Here’s the first AR demo I’ve seen that looks like a useful app.

If you are not inclined to watch video: it’s a tool that reads the spines of books and tells you when they are out of order. More to the point, it’s an app that reads special stickers and tells you when the stickers are out of order. Insight 1 is that there’s nothing that couldn’t have a sticker attached to it.

The demonstrator, Dr. Bo Brinkman, spends most of the video showing how the app makes it easier to move books back to their correct spot on the shelf with √ & X overlays and arrows that guide the book to its intended home. Insight 2 is that this is the least interesting part of the demo.

The most interesting part comes when Dr Brinkman mentions that a set of tablets running these apps could do an inventory of the shelves as a side-effect of people using it to scan for books out of place. If the software needs to know where a book belongs, then it must know what the book is. By looking at a book, you update the records of the system.

photo credit: Ozyman

This second part of the application makes the first part obsolete. Why re-shelve books at all? The point of shelving according to whatever cataloguing system is to make it easier to find things. Cataloguing systems are already demented. On the finding side, we’ve done away with catalogs wherever we can, preferring search. The scanners have already found the book. The system knows where the book is now. Why move it?

If you must move it, why move it according to catalog numbers? Why not arrange your books by height, or colour, or according to some idiosyncratic taxonomy of your own? Freed of the base need for findability, libraries are freed to arrange books according to any number of other technical or aesthetic reasons.

Imagine a library sorted according frequency of checkout, or books arranged on shelves according to the expected height of the expected readers. You could arrange for beauty, or according to some arcane set of interrelationships designed to drive surprise discoveries instead of easy finds. The casual browsing experience could be cultivated in any number of directions all without troubling the serious researchers with serious aims and specific needs.

It is all the same to the system, so long as a parade of scholars continues to crawl your stacks and record the location of the tomes in your care.