# ResearchZosho 研究蔵書, *the research holdings.* The Research Harness For The Rest Of Us. ResearchZosho is an open-source deep research assistant. Give it a question and it searches the web and scholarly papers, or only your own PDFs, and writes a report in which every claim points at a source. It runs on your own computer with a local LLM (llama.cpp, Ollama, LM Studio) or a hosted API. Three people, one problem. Your vet mentions a new drug for your dog's cancer. The follow-up is in three days. You want to know what the studies say: how well it works, for which breeds, and what the side effects are. The answer is spread across twenty papers, a regulator's review, and many pages that only look like medical advice. You are tracing your family. Your great-grandfather is in the 1911 census in Osaka. By 1921 he is gone from every record the family knows about. Somewhere there are ship manifests, a prefecture's emigration lists, and an old newspaper notice. Most of them are in Japanese. None of them are on the first page of a search. You are writing one chapter of a thesis on the influence of the Soviet-Afghan War on 1990s British science fiction. You have forty papers and articles saved, in three languages. You have one week to work out what they agree on, where they disagree, and what nobody has looked at yet. None of that can be read in one evening. That is the job ResearchZosho does. You give it the question. It reads and notes each fact with the source it came from. When it is done, a write-up is waiting: what it found, where the sources disagree, and what it could not resolve. Every claim in it points at a source you can check. It keeps what it found, so the next question on the same subject does not start from zero. If a paper you used gets a new version, or two of your own findings contradict each other, it tells you. Nothing counts as valid until you have reviewed it. It runs on your own computer with a model you pick, local or hosted. It is free and open source. It is for anyone who needs reliable research done. This is The Research Harness For The Rest Of Us. → **[LIBRARIAN_HOWTOUSE.md](docs/LIBRARIAN_HOWTOUSE.md)**: how to use it day to day → **[LIBRARY_PROTOCOL.md](docs/LIBRARY_PROTOCOL.md)**: for programmers, how a program talks to it → **[FAMILY_HISTORY.md](docs/FAMILY_HISTORY.md)**: researching your family, from a relative's notes to records and a family tree → **[YOUTUBE.md](docs/YOUTUBE.md)**: researching what is on YouTube — channels, what is said in a video and when, channels like one you know — without an API key → **[BEDROCK.md](docs/BEDROCK.md)**: using the models in your own AWS account (Amazon Bedrock) with your own AWS sign-in → **[MODELS.md](docs/MODELS.md)**: which model to run, from what we measured: the local models by your graphics card's VRAM first, then the hosted ones by what they got right, how long a run took and what it cost --- ## What you can do with it **Send it a question.** It works out what needs answering. It reads in parallel: the web, and the scholarly literature by DOI through Crossref and OpenAlex, and when the question calls for them the web archives, the Internet Archive, digitised historical newspapers, the National Diet Library's digitised Japanese books, the archives of source code and the video sites beside YouTube. A page that is gone is read from its archived copy. It writes the answer up in sections. It keeps going until the job is done, or for as long as you allow. It also reads sources in other languages, especially when the question points at a non-English language. The write-up says which languages its sources were in. **Check the answer.** Every write-up ends with a table of the facts it used. Each fact has its source and a quote. A numbered list of unique sources follows. Before the write-up is shelved, each sentence that cites a source is checked against that source. A problem is called out. If it cannot read a source, because of a paywall, a login or another issue, it lists that source so you can supply the text yourself. **Keep bad sources out.** A claim with one source stays a draft until a second, independent source backs it. A retracted paper disputes the claims that cite it. A site you ban is not used. A site you trust counts as a primary source. **Decide what stands.** Each claim starts as a draft. You accept it, dispute it or retire it. The library uses what you accept next time. **Talk to it.** `researchzosho chat` is a conversation with the Librarian. Ask what the shelves hold, ask a follow-up, say "find out …" to start a research run, ask "how did that go?", or go through the inbox. Every reply cites a look-up you can open. A figure it cannot back is marked as its guess. The same conversation is on the pages at `/chat`. **Ask what you already know.** `researchzosho ask "…"` shows what the library has on a question: each claim, where it came from, and whether it is accepted or still in dispute. **Bring your own documents.** A PDF, a web page, or a whole folder. Point it at a folder and every document in it is shelved as a collection. Then ask a question that searches only those documents, or one that starts there and goes to the web afterwards for more. **Get book recommendations.** Ask for a book to read first on a subject, what a book covers, or what to read next. The recommendations come from the library catalogues (Open Library, Japan's National Diet Library and others), never from the model's memory, so every book named is a real one with a link to its record. It looks past the bestseller lists and says what each book covers and who it is for. **Use your own shelf.** Point it at your Calibre library and it learns what you go for: the subjects, the authors you come back to, the decades and languages. `researchzosho myshelf like "