Robert Singerman's Judaica Americana II

A searchable bibliographical database of Robert Singerman's Judaica Americana II — an authoritative chronicle of American Jewish book and serial production from the seventeenth through the twentieth century, expanded with roughly 3,000 additional entries (nearly 10,000 records in total).

Live site: https://singerman.judaicadhpenn.org

Tech stack

• Astro — static site generation with dynamic entry, author, contributor, and holding pages
• React islands for the interactive search UI
• Algolia (react-instantsearch) — full-text search, faceting, and date-range filtering
• Tailwind CSS v4 for styling
• Netlify for hosting (via @astrojs/netlify)

Getting started

npm install
npm run dev      # start the dev server at http://localhost:4321

Scripts

Command	Description
npm run dev	Start the local dev server
npm run build	Build the production site to dist/
npm run preview	Preview the production build locally

Environment variables

Search and indexing require Algolia credentials in a .env file at the project root:

ALGOLIA_APP_ID=your-app-id
ALGOLIA_ADMIN_KEY=your-admin-key

The ALGOLIA_ADMIN_KEY is only used by the indexing script and must never be exposed to the browser; the client-side search UI uses a separate search-only API key.

Data pipeline

Bibliographic records originate as CSV exports and flow into the site in two steps:

1. CSV → JSON — csv-to-json/convertCsvToJson.mjs parses the source CSV (csv-to-json/Singerman-*.csv) into src/data/items.json, normalizing pipe-delimited fields and date ranges.
2. JSON → Algolia — src/utils/pushToAlgolia.mjs reads src/data/items.json and pushes the records to the Algolia index (dev_Singerman), deriving searchable start/end dates from each entry's date range.

Run each script with Node:

node csv-to-json/convertCsvToJson.mjs
node src/utils/pushToAlgolia.mjs

Project structure

src/
├── components/   React search islands (Search, HitCard, refinements, date slider, ...)
├── data/         items.json — the generated dataset
├── layouts/      BaseLayout.astro
├── pages/        Routes — index, search, entry/author/contributor/holding/[slug],
│                 about pages, and reference markdown (abbreviations, library symbols)
├── styles/       Global styles
└── utils/        pushToAlgolia.mjs, slugify.js
csv-to-json/      Source CSVs and the CSV→JSON conversion script