MSI students were winners and finalists in the MLibrary iDesign challenge to design an innovative tool to enhance the library’s discovery environment. Five teams competed and the winning application was announced Tuesday, April 19.
Kevin Champion and Caitlin Holman’s winning entry, CataLIST, addressed better ways to facilitate “serendipitous browsing” in the library environment, where discovery can be hindered by a lack of visual support, limited connections between items, and issues of scale. Their project demonstrated how local aggregators of resources can upload their syllabi, guides, bibliographies, articles, and websites into an accessible database, based on courses or subject matter, to be used by students, faculty, and librarians. Kevin and Caitlin will share the $2000 first prize. View demo.
Second place winner was Aoide (pronounced “ey-oi-dee), a virtual browsing system that aims to facilitate new methods of interpreting search results through virtualized representations of audio CD materials for the U-M Music Library. Though designed to search for music, it could theoretically be applied to search for all library materials, from books to movies.
Team members were Pei-Yao Hung, Sylvia Lai, Pei-Chih Shih (Bell), Yi-Ying Lin, and Gin Chieng will share the $500 prize. View site.
Also impressing the judges was FilmGrid, submitted by Tom Haynes, which won the People’s Choice award. This visual browser for the Askwith Media Library allows users to search by genre, year of release, and video cover and displays an overview of the film and whether it is currently available. The prize earned Tom $250. Tom Haynes was a recent finalist in the Mozilla Open Data competition with his entry on Firefox’s Usage by Age. View demo.
Entries were judged using such criteria as originality, degree of difficulty of the problem/challenge, transformative potential, an engaging virtual presentation, and usefulness to the Library community.
