SmartLibrary - Location-Aware Mobile Library Service

Searching books in large libraries can be a difficult task for novice library users. This paper presents SmartLibrary, a location-aware mobile library service demonstrated in the main library of the University of Oulu. The service provides map-based guidance to books and collections on a PDA. SmartLibrary is a completely software-based solution, which can be provisioned atop a WLAN installed for wireless Internet access, without any additional hardware. In a user evaluation conducted with over 30 patrons SmartLibrary was preferred over traditional shelf classification for finding books. After user evaluation the main library added SmartLibrary into their standard customer service.