Book Shelf View
Last week, I gave a talk at the California Academic Research Libraries IT workshop on next generation libraries. After my talk, a woman came up to me with an idea that I thought was extremely clever, and intuitively appealing. Sandra Rotenberg, at the Solano Community College Library, emailed me later with a concept description which she has given permission for me to reproduce. I've edited it slightly to make a condensed entry for Radar.
Imagine a hybrid of Google Earth with Google Books, mingled with a Street View formed from images of an actual library's book shelves.
Sandra says:
Imagine keyword searching through a book database, only the results come back as a picture of library stacks where the book is highlighted in context, where serendipity and browsing could happen.Each book would be represented by an image of its own spine functioning as a hyperlink that would take you directly into the content. Clicking on the spine goes directly into the book, with in-book search support, displaying keywords in context, and with options to view and jump from the Table of Contents or Index.
You could setup the stacks image up so that you can "walk" along the shelves as if you were walking the stacks across your computer screen. If the mapping was done well, you could zoom up toward the stacks and view the book on the shelf. If you did this at several libraries, both public and academic, you could flip between your book at the public library and your book in an academic library setting, browsing across both shelves.
Another idea in the physical world would be to create rooms, about the size of a study room, with walls with functionality similar to iPhone screens where one could search either through voice recognition or via wireless keyboards, then walk over to the wall of books, seeing life-size images. Touch a book, and open it with an effect similar to the Internet Archive's OpenLibrary page-turner, but using touch screen technology. This would be great for people sitting or standing who could use the pinch and spread fingers motions to zoom in and out, touch the screen to pull the top shelf to eye level.
Nice. Both implementations are very appealing.
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Comments: 11
[09.14.07 12:18 AM]
Hey, I've heard of something just like this already, where you can "walk" down the isles like you mentioned. It even has a coffee shop inside and a friendly girl at the counter. I think it's called Powells Books, located downtown in portland.
[09.14.07 06:47 AM]
The thing that always annoyed me about physical library stacks is the fact that you had to twist your head 90 degress to the left to read the titles. I don't recommend reproducing that particular "feature" in the virtual library. In fact, I think using the paradigm of a physical library is very limiting. Not having thought about this very long, I'm sure there are better paradigms yet to be implemented.
[09.14.07 07:28 AM]
Of course there's Delicious Library for Macs.
[09.14.07 09:24 AM]
This reminds me of Disclosure, the old Michael Crichton book/movie, where characters explore a file network virtually using a library building metaphor.
[09.14.07 09:45 AM]
Linden Lab has stated it will open source the server side of second life, it would be a possible environment for fast tracking this if Linden delivers.
[09.14.07 10:01 AM]
I ♥ Powell's Books
[09.14.07 10:07 AM]
The thing about having an interface that responds to touch is that you could rotate the view, so you don't need to turn your head 90 degrees unless you want to in order to extend the fantasy. You can rotate the view and walk up the shelves. We wouldn't be limited by reality in this digital representation -- the spine of the book could be mocked up for pamphlets or thin books, you could take a picture of the best spine extant for clarity, you could do away with the spine labels and just create mouseover or hover-over text that would pop up. In theory you could set up the same library with user preferences set at the beginning of each search to Dewey, or LC, so what mouseover text you see and what order the spine representations are in gets shuffled depending on your preferences. You could even toss in BISAC as a third alternative.
[09.14.07 10:10 AM]
And I also heart Powell's, and Pegasus and Black Oak and every other independent bookstore.
[09.14.07 06:59 PM]
Does information on the bookshelf flow from latitude information when walking in
front of the bookshelf at an actual library?
In that case, it is wonderful.
[09.14.07 07:00 PM]
Does information on the bookshelf flow from latitude information when walking in
front of the bookshelf at an actual library?
In that case, it is wonderful.
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Rick Prelinger [09.13.07 09:51 PM]
We've been interested in doing something quite similar with our library's collection, but are waiting until (1) more books are digitized from the current 2600, and (2) we can find a tech partner to work with us on development.