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How Hugo and libcatalog fit together

Hugo, in one paragraph

Hugo is a static site generator. You write content as Markdown files, Hugo renders them through HTML templates, and out comes a folder of plain .html files. That folder is the whole website — you can open it locally or upload it anywhere. Nothing runs on the server; there’s nothing to patch, scale, or get hacked.

This site is an ordinary Hugo site. The homepage, the events, and these docs are just Markdown + templates. For example, every event on the events page is one small Markdown file under content/events/:

---
title: "Static Sites 101: Build a Website with Markdown"
date: 2026-08-05T18:00:00
location: "Computer Lab"
---
A beginner-friendly workshop on building a static website...

Where libcatalog comes in

The catalog at /works/ is the one part that isn’t hand-written Markdown. It’s produced by the libcatalog framework and its Hugo module. The pipeline is deliberately boring — each stage is a file you can open:

  1. Bibliographic data (BIBFRAME/MARC records, or in this demo a reading list from Hardcover) is the source of truth.

  2. The projector (lcat project) flattens that into two static JSON files: catalog.json (one entry per work) and facets.json (precomputed facet counts).

  3. The libcatalog Hugo module reads those JSON files and mints one page per work — via a Hugo “content adapter”, with no per-book Markdown — plus the facet navigation and work detail pages. This site simply imports the module:

    # hugo.toml
[module]
  [[module.imports]]
    path = "github.com/freeeve/libcatalog/hugo"

  4. Pagefind indexes the built HTML afterward, giving real full-text search that runs entirely in the browser — no search server.

So the adopter site (this repo) provides config, data, a few content pages, and light branding; the module provides the catalog machinery. That separation is the whole idea: you get a catalog without running catalog software.

Controlled subjects vs. tags

libcatalog also models the difference between controlled subjects — authority URIs with localized labels, like LCSH and Homosaurus — and free tags (genre strings). Both are faceted side by side; on a work page the subjects carry a resolving ↗ link to the authority record. See any work in the catalog for both dimensions at once.

Next: build and deploy it yourself.

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