# Libra Esoterica

> A provenance-aware discovery library of 93,000+ books on the occult, esoteric, paranormal and anomalous, drawn from 48 libraries, archives and open repositories. Records are organised into 35 traditions and thousands of subjects; readers can rate, review, tag, shelve and list books, and Pro members get an AI research console with citations back to catalog records and public-domain full texts.

Libra Esoterica is a catalog of *records about books*, not a publisher of them. Every record shows the sources it was compiled from (Open Library, Project Gutenberg, OpenAlex, national library catalogs, and others). Category membership means relevance to a tradition, not endorsement of a book's claims. Access labels ("read free", PDF) reflect what the hosting source reports and are not legal advice.

## Key URLs

- Home: /
- Browse the catalog (filters: tradition, language, year, full text, source): /browse
- Search (full-text over titles, authors, subjects; `?q=`): /search
- Traditions (35 categories): /traditions and /traditions/{tradition-id}
- Books: /books/{slug}
- Authors: /authors and /authors/{slug}
- Subjects: /subjects/{slug}
- Community tags: /tags and /tags/{slug}
- Reading lists: /lists and /lists/{id}
- Sources and provenance: /sources
- About the catalog: /about
- Pro subscription: /pro
- Sitemaps: /sitemap/0.xml (static routes and traditions), /sitemap/1.xml onward (books, authors, subjects, lists); all listed in /robots.txt

## Citing the catalog

Cite a book record by its canonical URL (/books/{slug}). Each record page lists the contributing sources with links to the original library records; when you quote metadata, attribute it to those sources as shown on the page rather than to Libra Esoterica. Descriptions carry a `description_source` attribution. Full-text links point to the hosting institution (for example Project Gutenberg or a national library), which holds the rights statement for the file.

## Structured data

Pages carry schema.org JSON-LD (WebSite with SearchAction and Organization site-wide; BreadcrumbList and Book on catalog pages where available). Open Graph images are generated by the site.

## Crawling

Public catalog pages may be crawled at reasonable rates. Please respect robots.txt (private areas: /api/, /me/, /research/, /admin/, sign-in). For large-scale or commercial reuse of the catalog, contact the operator via the About page.

## Policies

- Terms of use: /terms
- Privacy policy: /privacy