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Library

Your Library is the set of papers you have explicitly saved. Membership = status='library'. Nothing else.

Library page with saved papers, reading workflow, and tabs

The Library page is action-oriented: it surfaces what you need to do next (read, triage, organise), not analytics about the collection. Analytics live on the Analytics tab (and per-collection analytics at the bottom of the Collections tab); the full tracked-paper table lives in the Corpus Explorer (Settings → Data & system).

Tabs

Tab Contents
Saved Every paper with status='library'. The default landing.
Reading list Papers currently being read, plus done / excluded history. Independent of saving.
Collections User-defined named groupings of saved papers.
Tags User-defined keyword chips, attached to saved papers (max 5 per paper).
Topics OpenAlex / source-backed scholarly topics, normalised and aliased.
Imports Staging panel for unresolved BibTeX / Zotero imports.

Landing cards

Above the tabs, the landing surfaces three primary workflow cards:

  • Library Papers — total saved count.
  • Currently Reading — reading_status='reading' count.
  • Collections — total collections count, with a quick-link to the Collections tab.

Below those cards, the page also surfaces a Reading workflow summary and a Needs Attention list for saved papers with concrete metadata gaps or lifecycle work left to do.

Save / rate / read

The three first-class operations on a Library paper:

  • Rating — set via the star control or the rating verbs (Save / Like / Love / Dislike). See Paper lifecycle.
  • Reading status — reading / done / excluded, set via the reading select on the row. Independent of rating.
  • Notes — a free-text field, saved via PUT /library/saved/{id}.

Collections

Collections are user-defined named buckets — for example "Thesis chapter 2", "Methods I want to try", "Papers to share with X". They are first-class: a paper can be in many collections, and a Collection has its own colour, description, and recency / size health metrics on the Collections tab.

Collections only contain saved papers. You can't add a Feed candidate or a Discovery suggestion to a collection — save it first, then organise.

Tags

Tags are short keyword chips. Cap of 5 per paper. They are intended to be lightweight: "review", "method", "data", "to-cite". Discovery boosts recommendation scores 2× when a candidate's topics match a tag you've used.

The Tags tab also surfaces:

  • Tag merge suggestions — when two tags are textually similar (spec and specs), ALMa proposes merging them.
  • Suggested tags — per-paper proposals derived from embeddings, topics, and text signals, depending on what is available.

Topics

Topics differ from tags: they're source-backed. ALMa pulls topics from OpenAlex (and SOLR-style aliases) and tracks them per paper. The Topics tab lets you:

  • See topic coverage across the Library.
  • Group / rename topics into your preferred vocabulary.
  • Define aliases so different upstream labels collapse to one.

Imports

Importing a Zotero or BibTeX file is treated as an explicit save intent — imported papers land directly in the Library (status='library', added_from='import'). They do not stage as candidates.

The Imports tab shows two things:

  1. The Import Papers dialog launcher (BibTeX / Zotero JSON / Zotero RDF / Online search).
  2. Unresolved imports — rows that landed in the Library but couldn't be matched to an OpenAlex work (low-confidence title-only matches, missing DOI, ambiguous author). Use Resolve OpenAlex to retry resolution and Enrich Metadata to fill in topics / citations on resolved rows.

See Importing for the workflow.

Bulk operations

The Saved tab supports row selection for bulk actions:

  • Add to collection — adds N papers to a collection at once.
  • Remove from Library — soft transitions to status='removed'.
  • Clear rating — sets rating to 0 (paper stays saved).

Read endpoints

GET    /api/v1/library/saved              # list saved papers
POST   /api/v1/library/saved              # save a paper
PUT    /api/v1/library/saved/{id}         # update notes / rating
DELETE /api/v1/library/saved/{id}         # remove (soft)

GET    /api/v1/library/reading-queue
GET    /api/v1/library/workflow-summary

POST   /api/v1/library/bulk/clear-rating
POST   /api/v1/library/bulk/remove
POST   /api/v1/library/bulk/add-to-collection

Plus collections (/library/collections), tags (/library/tags), topics (/library/topics), and imports (/library/import/*). See REST API for the full list.