.lists

Active arXiv inventory

.lists is the active, concise inventory for the local arXiv author archive. It is a metadata index only: it contains paper titles, public arXiv URLs, one-line descriptions, archive-created dates, author names, and update markers. PDFs, HTML pages, source packages, extraction caches, and other physical source records remain outside this repository.

Update process

The daily local automation advances through one author at a time in sorted rotation. It stores only the rotation cursor in the local archive, not in this repository. The automation follows this order:

1. Select the next author directory with a local _download-summary.csv.
2. Read that author’s stored search URL, or derive the arXiv author-search URL from the directory name.
3. Run the arxiv-bulk-author-archive collector for that one author. The daily run uses the normal bulk output and does not collect companion artifacts for every paper.
4. Require a successful collector exit and status=ok for the selected author batch.
5. Read every author _download-summary.csv, keep only paper folders currently present in the local archive, and resolve full author names from cached local PDF/arXiv metadata when needed. The generator fails closed if it can only identify an abbreviated author name.
6. Write index.md at this level and one index.md inside each full-name author folder, then advance the local rotation cursor.

The inventory step is downstream of the archive step. If the archive run fails or any batch row is not ok, .lists is not updated.

Inventory layout

.lists/
  README.md
  index.md
  Full Author Name/
    index.md

index.md is the root summary. Each author index contains a compact table with these fields:

Field	Meaning
change	new, updated, or existing compared with the preceding author index.
title	Full paper title.
arxiv_url	Public arXiv abstract URL.
description	One-line local abstract excerpt, or an explicit availability note.
archived_date	Date the paper folder was created in the local archive.

Each index has a metadata header containing repo_last_updated, local_archive_last_updated, documents_previously_counted, the current document count, added/updated/removed counts, update_status, and an inventory fingerprint. update_status is initial, changed, or unchanged, so a reader can identify an inventory update without opening source records.

The active root index lists only authors currently represented by the local archive batch summary. Existing source folders are never copied into .lists, and the scheduled job does not delete older inventory folders automatically.