Provider development

Provider responsibilities

Alexandria owns provider ingestion and shared book intelligence. Providers do not write reader libraries or personal Stache records. All products are In development; an approved provider extension interface and release-specific development instructions are not yet published here.

Before building a provider

Confirm the source permits the intended access and review its authentication, request limits and pagination. Keep credentials out of source code and diagnostics. Start with a small, reproducible sample containing ordinary records, missing values and ambiguous identities.

A work is the conceptual written work. An edition is a particular publication or manifestation. Preserve edition-specific details such as publication and format at that level. Do not assume a title alone is a reliable identifier.

Preserve evidence

Keep the source name, source record identifier, source URL and fetch time alongside imported values where supported. Retain evidence for derived or uncertain values. Do not silently discard failed or unmatched rows; they need a visible review or failure outcome.

Traverse all requested pages, respect the source's limits and make reruns safe against duplicate creation. A reliable existing match should not trigger unnecessary re-resolution. Ambiguous matches need review rather than forced canonical creation.

Test before use

Use fixtures for pagination, parsing failures, repeated imports and conflicting identities. Follow the approved extension interface when one is released; do not bypass it with direct database writes. See API documentation and administrator guides.