How this library is built.

I.   Why a library

The information exists. It just doesn't read well.

A student looking up the John Locke Essay Prize, the British Physics Olympiad, or the National Economics Challenge can find official rules in five minutes. What is harder to find is a clear answer to what the test actually feels like, what the past papers tell us about what to study, and what a teacher is supposed to do this week.

Most of what's written about high-school competitions today is either a vendor's sales page or a forum thread. Both are useful; neither is enough. We wanted something closer to a beloved magazine — researched from official sources, edited with care, set with margins, and printable on real paper.

II.   The four layers

Source. Normalize. Analyse. Publish.

Every playbook in this library is built up through the same four layers — in that order, never out of order.

1. Source.

   We catalogue every official surface — the rulebook, the past papers, the eligibility page — and download what we can. Each asset gets a reliability rating: high for first-party content, medium for affiliated mirrors, low for forum chatter. We rarely use the low tier.

2. Normalize.

   Raw PDFs and HTML are converted to plain text and checksummed. This is the boring layer. It is also the layer that makes every later claim auditable: any sentence in the published edition can be traced back to a specific paragraph in a specific official PDF.

3. Analyse.

   We pivot the normalized corpus into matrices — year by topic, category by stage, rule by form. The matrix is the unit of analysis, not the paragraph. If a fact won't fit into a matrix, we ask whether we really know it.

4. Publish.

   The matrix becomes prose. Two manuscripts per competition: a Student Edition (what to do, in what order) and an Advisor Edition (how to coach it, with a calendar and a sign-off sheet). Both ship as PDF, HTML, and EPUB, with a quality report.

III.   Publication standards

What a playbook must clear before we publish.

A playbook reaches the front page of this library only after it satisfies six standards. They are not negotiable.

The standard	What it means in practice
Source-confidence boundary	Each edition opens with a list of what the playbook does not contain (gated content, missing years, unverified claims). The reader knows the edge of the map.
Two editions, no more, no fewer	One Student Edition and one Advisor / Teacher / Institution Edition. We deliberately do not publish an “AI edition” — it tends to dilute the other two.
Three formats per edition	PDF, HTML, EPUB. Each format passes a structural check and a placeholder scan before release.
Quality report on file	File sizes, page counts, EPUB validation, remaining known issues — all captured in a public QUALITY_REPORT.md.
Build manifest	The exact toolchain (pandoc version, xelatex, font stack) is recorded in BUILD_INFO.txt so any edition is reproducible.
Canonical release marker	If multiple editions exist, exactly one is marked canonical. Historical editions are kept, never silently overwritten.

IV.   Status, in plain terms

What our four labels mean.

You will see four status labels on the catalogue page. They mean specific things.

• Published. Both editions have shipped with a quality report. The PDF is fit for printing.
• Archive. Sources collected and normalized. Analysis matrices in progress. No reader-facing edition yet.
• Audit. First-pass research complete. We know what exists and where; nothing is downloaded yet.
• Triage. Sources mapped, but access is blocked, gated, or under reconstruction. We are waiting for an opening.

V.   Voice & design

Why this looks the way it does.

The library is set in the Tian2 design system — a New Yorker-influenced editorial palette of warm cream and ink, with one accent colour per page. Headlines are in Playfair Display; body in Inter; Chinese in Noto Serif SC. Every line on a page is either 1px (a hairline rule) or 2.5px (a section break); there is nothing in between, and there are no drop shadows anywhere.

We chose this voice on purpose. The competitions we are documenting are not products to be sold. They are work the student is choosing to do, over months and sometimes years. They deserve a page that doesn't shout.

VI.   Editorial contact

Notes, errata, and a polite invitation.

If you spot an error — an out-of-date deadline, a misquoted rule, a broken link — please write to the editors. We take corrections more seriously than compliments. Each correction we accept is recorded in the next edition's quality report.

If you would like a competition added to a future volume — particularly in robotics, debate, music, or art, which are scheduled for Volume II — we'd like to hear from you too.