Scriptorium: System Design and Implementation of a Multi-Human, Multi-AI Collaborative Digital Library Search Platform
TL;DR
Scriptorium's complete system architecture, data model, collaborative-interaction design rationale, and AI orchestration mechanism are documents, including verbatim agent prompts, the deterministic guardrails that constrain them, the language model and retrieval configuration, and the steps needed to run the system.
Abstract
This technical report documents the design and implementation of Scriptorium, a digital library search interface designed to support multi-human, multi-AI collaboration: full cross-user transparency of search activity combined with a Manager--Worker architecture of seven role-specialized generative AI agents. A companion short demonstration paper describes Scriptorium's interaction design; because a demonstration format is constrained to a few pages, it necessarily omits most implementation detail. This report documents Scriptorium's complete system architecture, data model, collaborative-interaction design rationale, and AI orchestration mechanism, including verbatim agent prompts, the deterministic guardrails that constrain them, the language model and retrieval configuration, and the steps needed to run the system, so that the design can be inspected, critiqued, reproduced, and reused by other researchers. We also discuss the system's current limitations and the user study we are planning to evaluate how the shared record of search activity and the scoped agents support collaborative search, including collaborators'awareness of one another's work and how they use the agents.
