Scriptorium

Scriptorium

In a medieval **scriptorium** — Latin, "a place for writing" — scribes copied and illuminated manuscripts by candlelight, one careful page at a time. We borrowed the name, and a little of the reverence: this is where a course's materials are made, every artifact projected from one plain-Markdown source you own outright. The candles are gone; the craft, and the open formats, stayed.

A [Claude Code](https://claude.ai/code) skill **and** a standalone Node.js generator toolchain that turns **one tagged-Markdown lecture source** into a full set of production-ready course materials for university CS courses — lecture notes, a student Cornell handout, study questions, a pop quiz, a question bank, a slide deck, a GitHub Classroom assignment README, and reading-list study guides.

Everything is **100% open formats, end to end**: Markdown in; Markdown, LaTeX→PDF, and [Slidev](https://sli.dev) decks out. No proprietary or binary "source" formats anywhere in the pipeline.

Part of a self-hosted LMS — Lectern · Scriptorium · Oracle

**Lectern · Scriptorium · Oracle** together form a **self-hosted, open-format learning-management system (LMS)** for university CS courses — faculty-owned, no vendor lock-in, spanning the full course lifecycle: **administration** (Lectern) · **content** (Scriptorium) · **grading** (Oracle). It covers what a commercial LMS does, but in plain version-controllable formats you own end to end.

**Modular by design:** adopt one tool or all three. Each stands alone, owns one stage of the course lifecycle, and interoperates through open plain-text formats (Markdown · CSV · YAML · LaTeX) and stable CLI contracts — no shared database, no monolith, no lock-in. Each tool is also operable two ways: driven by an AI agent (Claude Code skill) *or* run directly by a human via its CLI.

Tool	Role	Repo
Lectern — the Registrar	Course administration — terms, sections, gradeboo