Exploring the Opportunity Space for a Collection Wall
Creators: name: Bodanzky, Alice
name: Cellucci, Vincent
name: Haslinger, Irene
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: user experience
learning centre
AI
serendipity
digital transformation

description: The TU Delft Library is in the process of rethinking its public space — Library Learning Centre (LLC)—to better reflect digital transformation and the changing role of libraries. The aim is to become a place for inspiration, collaboration, training, and resources—functioning as a knowledge hub anchored in its collections. But how can physical and digital collections be experienced in a meaningful way for visitors?

The common denominator is knowledge, gathered in all the various collections the library maintains and makes available for the TU Delft community (and where possible to external parties). Besides physical collections (books and objects from special collections), digital collections play an increasingly prevalent role. Visualising and connecting physical and digital collections to current research interests, education, and society is paramount for the knowledge contained within these collections to be activated.

The Library staff in collaboration with Education (professors, researchers, and students) has been exploring ways to translate these ideas into interactive experiences for the LLC visitors.

Within this context, the LLC is embarking on an ambitious transformation journey, starting by turning its iconic book wall into the Collection Wall—an interactive experience designed to inspire exploration, discovery, and serendipity. This innovative project will visualize and activate both our physical and digital collections, fostering new connections and narratives for educational purposes and cultural programming. It stands as a key component of the library’s mission to engage visitors through its collections.

We are exploring the opportunity space (combined with research and development) of the Collection Wall project. We have dedicated one section of the book wall to become a prototyping area. Prototype #1, focused on master theses and dissertations (Sept 2023), is our first attempt to integrate screens within bookshelves. The prototype displays data from online repositories and presents distributed displays and a touchscreen for data visualization as well as a scanner which merges RFID and NFC scanning technologies.

Books and tokens can be scanned for digital recommendations and publications by “Best Graduates” (nominated annually by faculties) presents a curated navigation option. The prototype also includes vitrines, with Ai-generated keywords used to link content of historic dissertations, displayed with associated physical objects from our Academic Heritage collection and pair with recent research on the same subject (also using Ai).

An interactive application at the heart of the prototype facilitates exploring the student thesis and dissertation repository using machine learning to cluster and recommend similar publications. Users can investigate timelines, filter data by faculties, and visually explore interdisciplinary clusters and outliers.

Initial user feedback of Prototype #1 confirmed the potential of the concepts being tested and helped to identify the main issues to be addressed on the next iteration. The findings of preliminary user tests are also being incorporated into internal discussion and co-creation sessions.

As a library at the centre of a university of technology, this Collection Wall project strives to parallel the innovation transformation of Libraries as institutions and society at large.