How to use a GitHub repository as your digital library
By: Ganesa Vijayakumar
Tags: Books, Search Engines, Libraries, Github, Digital

How to use a GitHub repository as your digital library

This is just an idea that how we can use a GitHub repository as a digital library for our e-books collections.

Actually, most people are very interested in collecting e-books from different sources like free publishing sites and friends, etc and have a huge collection of e-books but many of those may felt that they didn’t utilize most of the good books. I’m also on the list. I think the main reason would be those e-books are not easily accessible because If we want to get a specific e-book with some specific author/s, editions, and publications, It will be a hard job to search and get that from the collections of e-books. As we need to navigate into each folder until we get the file which we were looking for.

Finding files on GitHub

We can create a digital library for our e-books collections by using the Finding files feature on GitHub. Before that let’s understand what is this feature about.

GitHub repositories have a feature like Finding File to search any specific file by name

We can use it in two different ways. First one, there will be a button Find file on the left side of the repository page as I have highlighted in the below image.

Another way, we can find the file using the short cut ‘t’. If we navigate into the repository page and press the letter ‘t’, we will see that the page will be reloaded and ready for file search as I have highlighted in the below screenshot.

How the file search works on GitHub

It seems, all the words are indexed separately which helps to find a specific file using any word of the file name. see the below screenshot which will give you a clear understanding.

As you see If I search with the word ‘Java’, it gives the file list which contains the word ‘java’ in the name of the file.

In addition, if we add another word in the search which will be considered as an additional filter for file search so we will get the files that contain both first word and the second word. In the below screenshot, I used the words ‘Java Programming’ and got the list of the file which contains both words.

Guidelines to follow for the better result of digital library

I hope, now you understand what is Finding Find feature on GitHub and how the file search works on it. The important thing is how we are going to use this feature to make a digital library for our e-books collections. Let’s see what the things we should consider to get a better result.

Create Rule for file names :

Make sure to create a rule for the file name of e-book and strict to that rule while creating names for all the files. for example:

[ file name ] [ author name ] [ second author name if any ] [ edition/version number if any ] [ publishers name ] [ year ] …

: Make sure to create a rule for the file name of e-book and strict to that rule while creating names for all the files. for example: [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] … Give file name as commit message:

Please provide the same file name as a commit message either as subject or description as it will give additional benefits to search files when we couldn’t find the file by using Finding File feature when there are many files available with the word which we used to search.

In the below screenshot, I used the word to search ‘Introduction’ and got the files by using the commit message.

Be clear about File and repository size limitations:

To ensure good performance for our users, we recommend repositories be kept under 1GB each. Keeping repositories small ensures that our servers are fast and downloads are quick. If your repository does exceed 1GB, you might receive an email from GitHub Support asking you to reduce it. Repositories have a hard size limit of 100GB. If you reach 75GB, you’ll receive a warning from Git in your terminal the next time you push a change. In addition, we place a strict maximum size limit of 100 MB for individual files in a repository Source: Github -> what-is-my-disk-quota Note: If you add a file to a repository via a browser, the file can be no larger than 25 MB. For more information

Conclusion:

I hope this info will help you to create your own digital library for your e-books collections using GitHub repository and quickly accessible as we started using GitHub very frequently nowadays. Yes, I understand, Finding File feature is not introduced to use repositories like this but if it is more useful which gives the ability to have e-book collections and quickly accessible, we can use it with some our own guidelines which will not affect much on Memory and Performance of GitHub repositories.

We should not use it as a Backup resources

If you have any licensed files then please make your repository as private

As pointed above, there are some limitations on repository size so upload only the required books which you will access later.

I hope it helps you a little bit. Please let me know if you have any suggestions to improve. Thank You.