Libraries¶

A library is the unit of privacy in Primer. It has one owner, and nobody else can see it unless that owner shares it.

What "private" means here¶

A library you have not been given access to is not merely unreadable — it is undetectable. Asking Primer for one returns the same "not found" as asking for a library that never existed. That is deliberate: an error that distinguished "forbidden" from "missing" would let anyone confirm that a particular library exists, which is itself a disclosure.

The same applies to documents inside a library, and to their contents in search results.

Creating and renaming¶

A library needs a name, which can be up to 120 characters, and can be renamed at any time. Renaming does not affect its documents.

If two people edit the same library, the second change can be rejected rather than silently overwriting the first. Reload and reapply the change.

Deleting¶

Deleting a library takes it and its documents out of reach immediately. The underlying passages and files are removed afterwards, in the background.

The order matters: the tombstone is written first, so there is no window in which a deleted library still answers questions. What follows is cleanup, not part of the deletion the user asked for.

The owner of a library can let other people read it. Open the library and name them by email address under Shared with.

Sharing gives read access and nothing else. Someone a library is shared with can open it, read and download its documents, and ask questions answered from it — with the same citations the owner gets. They cannot add documents, rename it, delete it, or share it onward. Those stay with the owner, because a share says nothing about them.

Nothing is copied. Both people read the same library, the same files and the same passages, so sharing costs nothing and a document added by the owner is immediately available to everyone it is shared with.

Only people who have signed in to this deployment at least once. Primer learns that someone exists when they first use it, so an address it has never seen is refused rather than accepted and quietly left dormant — which would leave you believing you had shared something that nobody could open.

If your identity provider reports the same address for more than one account, Primer refuses to guess between them and says so.

Stopping¶

Removing someone takes effect on their next request. There is nothing to clean up and no window to wait out: access is checked when it is used, and because sharing never copied anything there is no second copy left holding the material.

They are not told. The library simply stops appearing for them.

What it looks like from the other side¶

A library shared with you appears in your list marked Shared, and in the library picker when you ask a question. What you cannot do with it is not offered rather than offered and refused.

Duplicating a library¶

Copying a library gives you a second one you can change without touching the first. Add to one, delete from the other; they share nothing that either can edit.

What they do share is the stored files themselves, which are identical bytes and never change, so a copy costs almost nothing to keep.

The passages behind a copy are rebuilt rather than copied over, so its documents arrive queued and become searchable as they finish indexing — the same as documents you have just uploaded. Browsing it works immediately.

The copy belongs to you, even if you copied a library someone shared with you, and it is named after the original unless you give it a name. That is the way to keep something that has been shared with you: a copy is yours, and stays yours if the original is unshared.