Stop losing engineering hours to literature searches
Your firm has bought thousands of specialist publications. Librario turns that asset into something your engineers can actually use: one central catalogue, full-text search across every PDF, and access from home or on site. Moving over from Excel lists typically takes five working days.
The status quo
The costly shadow library of Excel sheets and network drives
Your structural and environmental engineers often need literature spanning several decades, whether for work on existing buildings or for complex design checks. Usually it is scattered: on office shelves, on network drives, or as unsorted PDFs in folder structures whose logic only the person who created them understands.
Someone who wants to open the 2015 Beton-Kalender (the German concrete engineering yearbook) for a project on an existing building often doesn’t know whether the copy is on the shelf, at a colleague’s home or has been on loan for two years. Anyone looking for content that isn’t exactly in the file name searches in vain. Half an hour per search adds up to a real cost across 30 employees. The problem isn’t a lack of literature. It’s the lack of fast access to it.
Mid-sized structural engineering firms typically manage 3,000–6,000 publications; environmental engineering firms hold up to 30,000 volumes across disciplines. Each one was bought because someone needed it at some point. Most can’t be found today because there is no central search tool. And nobody has the time to maintain a library catalogue by hand in Excel: as soon as the person in charge leaves the project, the list goes out of date and expertise slowly gets lost.
Your new working day
Found in seconds. Maintained with little effort.
Someone searches for Stahlbetonverbundbalken (steel-concrete composite beam). Librario searches not just file names and titles but the full text of every PDF, and splits German compound words automatically, so each part of the term leads straight to the right paragraph in the document. The reference to a standard in the Beton-Kalender? One second, not one hour.
New employees search their department’s curated collections on their own from day one. Anyone who can use a browser finds their way around straight away. Experienced employees spend less time explaining, fewer books get bought twice, and research works from home or directly on site.
And the upkeep? You drag a new PDF into the browser. Librario extracts the title, authors and publication year on its own. You can delegate cataloguing to student assistants or your office assistant. They get the Librarian role. Responsibility for the content stays with the team.
With Librario
Four features that speed up everyday work in an engineering firm
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Full-text search in PDFsOne search box for everything. Searches the metadata and the full text of attached PDFs. Splits compound technical terms automatically and filters historical holdings by publication period.
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Automated cataloguingUpload a PDF or scan an ISBN. Librario fetches the metadata automatically from the document and external databases. A finished record is ready less than 30 seconds after upload.
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Collections by disciplineBring knowledge together in subject collections. Ideal for onboarding new engineers and for providing the current standards for a particular construction project.
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Browser-based and mobileNo local installation, no VPN required. Through the browser-based interface you can open any expert report from home or on a tablet right on site.
What do slow searches really cost you?
Conservative assumption: two minutes of research time saved per employee per day, 30 employees, an average of €45 an hour. The full ROI calculator subtracts licence and migration costs.
How much research time do you save?
Research time per year
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See Librario at work on your own literature.
In a demo we use your own examples to show how Librario finds complex technical terms in the full text and catalogues PDFs automatically.