Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Dundee
BookSight. (Digital interactive visualisation. Exhibited at EVA London 9 - 31 July 2013; British Library, London, August 2013;
Booksight is a library tool and interactive installation that supports making connections and discovery. Woods posits the spacial architecture of the library is an act of ‘inspiration architecture’ or sense-making, physically reminding us that the path to discovery doesn’t always take a straight line. As libraries move towards blended or fully digital collections, so search, user experience and engagement with a digital catalogues require the digital to be made physical, and gestural, interactive and visual systems provide these alternative means.
Woods developed BookSight following her presentation at Profiling and Privacy as part of Digital Conversations at British Library on 25th May, 2012. Booksight builds on those developments and linked open data, real-time data processing and gesture-based interactions for live events. The visualisation displays the flow of book requests from users requesting books from the catalogue of the Reading Rooms. The underlying software system, developed as part of Wood’s RCUK SerenA project and demonstrated at CIRCLE, Inspace, Edinburgh Informatics (2013), is designed to process an average of 7,000+ book requests over 24 hrs. The system enriches the data, linking to original book cover illustrations, and text descriptions from external resources not available within the library. It has been evaluated by Woods (2013) as a tool to create opportunities for serendipity. Booksight is available to view on DVD presentation at British Library (2013), a demo at PAAMS13 Salamanca and is was exhibited at EVA London 2013, British Computer Society London, where it was awarded the Imperica Prize for best Demo/Exhibit.
The research is written up in:
Woods, M, Mehrpouya.H, Forth. J, (2013) EVA Electronic Visualisation and the Arts ‘Booksight: Visualising the Library of Ideas’ for EVA London 2013, BCS: The Chartered Institute for IT, in the series: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)
