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My university has a program that offers classes at a nearby prison, and this program is about to get a bunch of new laptops. As many of you know, prisons are pretty restrictive and inflexible regarding technology. These laptops cannot be connected to the internet, so it is very challenging to provide students with opportunities to search across large collections of content for research (e.g. Wikipedia, any article database). (A few years ago, we briefly considered using a small portable server developed by Libraries Without Borders that hosted offline versions of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, etc., but this solution did not make it past the prison administration.) Our reference librarian would like to set these new laptops up so that the students can have the simulated experience of searching for information, even if it is offline. 1. His first idea is to simply put a lot of articles, with full-text PDFs, into Zotero on each computer and just use the native search functionality of Zotero. 2. His second idea is to cobble together a handful of disparate resources, such as XML files from Medline/PubMed, a version of offline Wikpedia, and one or two other collections, then somehow engineer a search interface that will simultaneously search across these 2-3 separate resources (that are stored locally on the laptop) and display results. Is there any relatively straightforward way to accomplish #2? (Notice I didn't use the adjective *easy.*) What technologies would be involved? Regards, Kyle Breneman University of Baltimore