How can we bridge the gap between the visual experience of physical and digital libraries? On the 15th of June 2018, members of the Visual Navigation Project presented the outcomes of the project during a breakfast meeting.
This fall the group "Real Fiction" has been working on a project for the Science Library as part of their the course INF2260 – Interaction Design. Their project goal was "visualizing the science fiction collection and community building."
Digital Humanities Clinics, winner of this year's LIBER Innovation Award, is a free Dutch training program for library staff. We attended one of the five workshop days of the program. This fascinating day focused on audiovisual library materials, and introduced GIS, audiovisual platforms, as well as Computer Vision.
In November 2017, we attended a conference built around the intriguing term BIG VIDEO. For the Visual Navigation Project, this conference provided rich inspiration for integrating contextual video materials in collection-exploration tools.
How to create touch screen applications to entice & engage library visitors? This was the premise of a workshop organized by the Visual Navigation Project on 20 November 2017. In the workshop, participants gained experience with building touch applications using the XIMPEL framework.
This post summarizes our visit to the NFF Interactive: Storyspace symposium, taking on the question "What is real?" in the current society surrounded by digital technologies, as well as current tactics and strategies to cope with it.
In May, 2017, the Visual Navigation Project created a touch table application for the Abel Prize award ceremony taking place that month. This post describes the ideas behind this application, and how it was used during its five week deployment in the UiO Science Library.
On the first day of the VIRAK conference, the Visual Navigation Group hosted a workshop called "Inspirational Journeys – challenges and solutions for visual navigation of library resources". The objective of this workshop was to foster interactive discussions about how users can explore and interact with library materials. We had two distinguished guests from North Carolina State University, Mike Nutt and Walt Gurley, who showed us how libraries can look and function if you push visualization to its limits.
In his Master's project, a student in Interaction Design designed an application aimed at inducing curiosity. This post summarizes his work and discusses the resulting touch table application.
On the 8th of March, an exclusive pre-screening of the movie “Hidden Figures” took place in the Science Library. Surrounding this event, we created and installed a touch table application within the library space, focusing on movie fragments, contextual information and related books.
To obtain insights into the actual use of this application, we gathered basic statistics. These statistics can help us to improve the application, to understand user behavior with respect to touch tables, and for future developments of novel applications in the physical library space. This post summarizes our findings, based on the first two weeks in which the touch table was installed in the library.
On the 8th of March, an exclusive pre-screening of the movie Hidden Figures takes place at the Science Library of the University of Oslo. To support this exciting event, we have designed an application for our touch table, now residing in an exhibition in the Science Library. This post outlines some of our experiences during the development and design of this application.
Touch tables can be a highly valuable addition to academic libraries, for instance to visualize a library's collection. In the Visual Navigation Project, we explored the needs and possibilities associated with touch tables. To discuss ideas with respect to innovative touch table use, we organized two brainstorm sessions, together with a Master student in Interaction Design.
Evidently, visualizing books is a pivotal goal of the Visual Navigation Project. In the last weeks of December, we have created an initial infrastructure for enriched book data. The past weeks, we have explored ways to visualize book records of the University of Oslo Library.
How can touch tables be used in a library setting? Well, for example to present a part of the library's collection. In the Visual Navigation Project, and in collaboration with the Department of Informatics, we are exploring potential uses of touch tables.
Unbeknownst to some, the Science Library has an extensive collection of Science Fiction books. To increase engagement with this collection, students interaction design embarked on a project to create a highly visual prototype application for use with a touch table. This prototype was recently evaluated in the actual library setting.
Crowdsourcing is increasingly popular as a way to enrich the (meta)data of cultural heritage institutions, but also to increase audience engagement with heritage collections. On the 31st of October, we attended a workshop entitled Two birds, one stone: Bridging cultural heritage collections with crowds and niches, organized at the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision. Various experts and researchers showed both the value and caveats of using crowdsourcing in an institutional setting.
Since January 2015, academic libraries in Norway are making use of Oria, a catalog based on the ExLibris Primo software. Within Oria, various user actions, such as searches and clicks on search filters are captured over time, and statistical data can be accessed via Primo Analytics. This wealth of data provides new opportunities to analyze user interaction with current library catalogs, and to potentially improve the access to library collections.
In an exploratory study within the Visual Navigation Project, we have analyzed the log data available of the library catalog of the University of Oslo. In particular, we looked at two datasets: the most popular queries (between January 2015 and September 2016), and the “zero-result” queries, i.e. the queries for which searches did not get any results (between August 2015 and September 2016).
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