Give Bowerbird a topic, a worksheet or a reading. Get back videos, papers, podcasts and reports — every link resolved, every DOI validated, each with a rationale for why it belongs in your unit.
Free hosted tier · Open source (MIT) · Your own machine, your own model if you want
Perplexity, NotebookLM, Elicit and Consensus already turn topics into sources. Bowerbird is built for the part that happens after retrieval — the part a lecturer actually spends time on.
Every link is resolved and every DOI validated against Crossref, Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. Paywalled is distinguished from dead. A hallucinated citation is impossible by construction, because nothing is generated — only retrieved and checked.
Licensing status (OER, Creative Commons, library-subscription), accessibility notes like captions and tagged PDFs, and LMS-ready export. The admin work you'd otherwise do by hand.
A rationale per suggestion — why this one, what it adds, what it doesn't cover. Source-type labels (peer-reviewed, practitioner, vendor, journalism, government) and a commercially-interested flag on consultant material, which is itself a teaching moment.
Balanced by format and voice on purpose: one video, one paper, one practitioner piece, an explicit pass for non-Anglo sources — not five similar US blog posts. The retrieval layer's biases shouldn't become your reading list's biases.
Thumbnails for every result so you can spot the cookie wall, the login gate, the parked domain and the SEO farm at a glance — before you click.
Open source, MIT licensed. Run it hosted, in Docker on your own server, or as a desktop app with a fully local LLM via Ollama — your teaching content never has to leave your machine.
The hosted tier is genuinely free — inference is self-hosted, so the only constraint is fair-share concurrency, not a per-token bill.
| Free hosted | Self-host / Desktop | |
|---|---|---|
| Input | One topic or document | Batch: a semester of topics at once |
| Verification | Yes — always | Yes — always |
| Thumbnails | oEmbed and og:image | Full page screenshots |
| LLM | Quota'd, or bring your own key | Local Ollama, or your own key |
| Export | Markdown | Markdown, LMS HTML, reading lists, citations |
The Docker image is the exact build the hosted service runs: web UI and server in one container. Bring-your-own API keys are never stored server-side — browser storage only, passed per request.
# Quick start
docker run -p 3000:3000 ghcr.io/michael-borck/bowerbird:latest
# Or the full stack — just two files, no source checkout:
mkdir bowerbird && cd bowerbird
curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/michael-borck/bowerbird/main/docker-compose.yml
curl -fsSL -o .env https://raw.githubusercontent.com/michael-borck/bowerbird/main/.env.example
docker compose up -dBatch runs, full screenshots, local model, no quotas. Grab the latest installer for macOS, Windows or Linux.
npm install -g @michaelborck/bowerbird-cli for
scripting and batch, or build on
@michaelborck/bowerbird-core directly.
Multi-arch (amd64 / arm64) images on GHCR, tagged per release.