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This talk will share Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries’ experience creating a custom mobile catalog. The discussion will first make the case for mobile catalogs, discuss the context of mobile search, and give an overview of vendor and custom mobile catalogs. The second half of the talk will look under the hood of OSU Libraries' custom mobile catalog to provide implementation strategies and discuss tools, techniques, requirements, and guidelines for creating an optimal mobile catalog experience that offers services that support time critical and location sensitive activities.
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'''Talk Title:'''
Enhancing discoverability with virtual shelf browse
'''Speaker name(s), affiliation(s), and email address(es):'''
Andreas Orphanides, NCSU Libraries, andreas_orphanides@ncsu.edu
Cory Lown, NCSU Libraries, cory_lown@ncsu.edu
Emily Lynema, NCSU Libraries, emily_lynema@ncsu.edu
'''Abstract of no more than 500 words:'''
With collections turning digital, and libraries transforming into collaborative spaces, the physical shelf is disappearing. NCSU Libraries has implemented a virtual shelf browse tool, re-creating the benefits of physical browsing in an online environment and enabling users to explore digital and physical materials side by side. We hope that this is a first step towards enabling patrons familiar with Amazon and Netflix recommendations to "find more" in the library.
We will provide an overview of the architecture of the front-end application, which uses Syndetics cover images to provide a "cover flow" view and allows the entire "shelf" to be browsed dynamically. We will describe what we learned while wrangling multiple jQuery plugins, manipulating an ever-growing (and ever-slower) DOM, and dealing with unpredictable response times of third-party services. The front-end application is supported by a web service that provides access to a shelf-ordered index of our catalog. We will discuss our strategy for extracting data from the catalog, processing it, and storing it to create a queryable shelf order index.
