Sharing a 'read only' database with researcher

Hm, may I know what issues you faced inviting them via email as a read-only collaborator?
https://support.airtable.com/docs/managing-billable-collaborators-from-your-airtable-account#adding-and-removing-billable-base-collaborators

They would be able to use the ‘Search’ extension as a read-only account as well

Thank you so much for your help!  

1. We are building a searchable database on the family folders and local history folders. In this database, we also set up through ‘extensions’ a search engine.
2. We have researchers coming to the library from about every state.  How can we set up a database that researchers can research without them adding, editing, etc?  A ‘read only’ database.  No, we do not want to put this database on the internet.
3. And if we add information to the database will this ‘read only’ database be updated also?
4. In the database, each record has an ‘image’ (copy) of the document found in the folder.  These ‘images’ are what the researcher will be researching and if they want to make a copy of that ‘image,’ they can.  Or if they want to, we could email a copy of these ‘images’ to a researcher and not the entire database.   
5. Can this be set up that more than one researcher can be researching this database at the same time?

We have researchers coming to the library from about every state.  How can we set up a database that researchers can research without them adding, editing, etc?  A ‘read only’ database. 

Yeap add them as read-only collaborators and they won’t be able to edit anything! 

No, we do not want to put this database on the internet.

Hm, I’m confused by this bit, sorry!  By definition, anything you put on Airtable is on the internet?  If you mean you don’t want it to be publicly accessible, only users who’ve been invited to the base as collaborators will have access to the base if that helps?

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And if we add information to the database will this ‘read only’ database be updated also?

Yeap, any updates you make on Airtable will be live to the users you’ve invited as read-only collaborators

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Or if they want to, we could email a copy of these ‘images’ to a researcher and not the entire database.   

Hmm..I’m not sure how this would work.  Emailing them as attachments would mean having to deal with the 25mb attachment limit, and we can’t email them as links either as Airtable has expiring download links for attachments

To get this to work you’d probably need to host the images on another service and send them those links?  Hopefully someone else has a better idea!

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Can this be set up that more than one researcher can be researching this database at the same time?

Yeap, you can have multiple read-only users on the same base at the same time