The Automated Librarian: A Drupal 11 Data Discovery

February 04, 2026

I had a problem that twenty years of "digital hoarding" created: 180+ technical eBooks and hundreds of PDFs buried inside my NAS (Network Attached Storage). It was a goldmine of knowledge, but it was silent. If I wanted to find a specific configuration for a 2014 Linux kernel or a Drupal 7 hook, I had to hunt for it manually.

The goal was simple but ambitious: Move beyond a "folder of files" and build a living, breathing intelligence engine. I wanted a system that could read, index, and surface knowledge instantly.

Why Drupal 11?

I chose Drupal 11 not just as a CMS, but as a robust framework for data management. By leveraging the Migrate API, NFS mounts, Apache Solr, and a local Large Language Model (LLM), I've transformed a static archive into "The Automated Librarian."

This series documents every step of that journey—from the "soul-crushing" realization of the scale of the task to the high-tech satisfaction of a sub-second full-text search.

The Journey So Far

The Automated Librarian: Part 1 - Architecting an Intelligent eBook Library in Drupal 11

Tired of manual data entry? See how I built an "Automated Librarian" in Drupal 11. This series explores using Migrations, Open Library, and Ollama to turn raw files into an AI-summarized, full-text searchable discovery engine.

The Automated Librarian: Part 2 – The Migration Engine

Taming 20 years of data chaos. In Part 2, I build the Drupal 11 migration engine to move hundreds of eBooks from a legacy NAS into a structured Media Library using the Migrate API and custom PHP process plugins.

Author

Ron Ferguson

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