Ubilibrary:situated large public display as interactive interface to library services

Abstract We present the UbiLibrary service developed for a large public display deployed at the lobby of a municipal library. The design of the system was driven by library surveys, interviews of library users and library staff, and analyzing the use of library’s current digital services. The system provides library customers with rich information on library’s services and events through a metadata engine that semantically complements the library’s database with supplementary metadata crawled from online sources and further personalizes information according to the age and gender of the user estimated through face recognition. The service was assessed with a task-based evaluation by library customers, expert evaluation by professional librarians and in the wild field study. The service was found easy to use and regarded as a valuable addition to the library’s digital services. Consequently, it was also deployed on two smaller displays at book collections