While writing my master thesis about an digital but reality-based interface to library collections (Blended Shelf), I did an extensive research of related work. In the following posts I give an quick overview over products, concepts and prototypes which somehow integrate shelves into their user interface.
The lists are not final and I sure have missed some approaches, so I’ll update the posts if I’ll stumble upon other interfaces. If you know about shelf-related interfaces which are not listed here, please let me know by contacting me or simply leave a comment.
I categorized the different approaches into three groups. The categories may be ambiguous and the single approaches may overlap, but until now I haven’t found a better way to cluster the various approaches:
- Commercial: This categorie assembles applications and interfaces which were or still are commercially available for end users or institutions other than libraries.
- Scientific: For items in this categoriy libraries are only a use case to explore some concepts. Mostly the prototypes where not actually used in libraries except for research studies.
- Library-specific: Here I collect all approaches which focus on serving libraries and their users. This products could be the result of commercial development, library in-house development or of scientific approaches.
Today I start the series with the commercial products. Posts about the library-specific and scientific approaches will follow soon.
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