How to create new services between library resources, museum exhibitions and virtual collections
| Date | 05 April 2011 |
| Pages | 15-19 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/07419051111135236 |
| Published date | 05 April 2011 |
| Author | Claudio Vandi,Elhadi Djebbari |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
1. Overview of BSI and CSI: what are
their relations and what are their
links
The Bibliothe
`que des sciences et de
l’industrie library (BSI) is part of
France biggest Science Museum, the
Cite
´des sciences et de l’industrie (CSI,
part of universcience). The creation of
documents and bibliographies related to
CSI’s exhibitions and collections
is among its everyday activities.
For example, CSI exhibitions link to
BSI bibliographies and some BSI
documents are arranged in order to
provoke the reader’s curiosity about
ongoing exhibitions. Furthermore, the
library and the museum have links to
third-party resources. Among them,
BSI links to the open science resources
(OSR) portal (www.osrportal.eu) the
portal of an ongoing eContentplus
project of which BSI is partner that
aims at creating an Open repository
of scientific digital objects available
in European science museums and
science centres. A different kind of
resources can be found in LUTIN
Userlab (www.lutin-userlab.fr) a
cognitive science laboratory and
technological platform dedicated to
the studying the usage of new
technologies hosted by CSI. Thanks
to the collaboration between BSI and
LUTIN, BSI visitors are often invited
to participate to experiences in the
lab that contribute to their scientific
knowledge. On the web, museum and
library materials and external
resources are connected by web
links, but there is no direct relation
between their physical elements.
Thus, experiencing the museum
“Spectacular Collections” and
accessing the library resources are
today two separate, self-containing
experiences.
As mobile technologies progress well
in the connectivity field, we decided to
use this technology to make a link
between library’s collections, museum’s
objects and virtualobjects. The approach
we choose is a progressive one; we
proceed by a technical validation (proof
of concept) beforewidening the solution
on all the data. In this paper, we discuss
the main opportunities and challenges
related to the introduction of mobile
technologies in the library as well as the
usage scenarioswe foresee to experiment
at BSI.
2. Mobile devices: opportunities and
challenges
Today, BSI’s purpose is to create
new services around the library
resources (on-site and remote) and the
visitors of the Cite
´. We believe that
mobile devices can offer interesting
opportunities for bridging the gaps of
access and augmenting the interactions
between the variegated resources
described before. Mobile devices can
track the visitor’s path and make the
connection between the exhibitions, the
library and the web materials and can
thus be used to create a footbridge for
accessing these different objects. In
museums, nomadic devices (mobiles,
personal digital assistants (PDAs), etc.)
are more and more used for guiding the
user and giving him information on the
objects he sees. For the libraries in
general, mobiles and PDAs can offer
different services such as: catalog
search, provide practical informations
(hours, contacts, etc.), content delivery
(e-books, full-text content), reference
services and links to external content
providers. Many existing technologies
can be used for this purpose. Among
them: near field communication (NFC)
and radio frequency identifier (RFID) to
identify and track objects, quick
response (QR) codes to trigger remote
content, Bluetooth for exchanging data
over short distances, global positioning
system and indoor sensors to track the
user position outside or inside a
building. However, the potential
impact of these technologies on the
visitor experience is far from being
understood and clearly assessed.
As pervasive information
technologies, mobiles modify the
relation between the visitor and his
habitual information ecosystem
(de Rosnay, 2000) and can affect the
way visitors explore the library and the
museum and the way they learn from
their objects (Tselios et al., 2008;
Wang et al., 2009; Bartneck et al.,
2006;Al-khamayseh et al., 2007;Corbeil
and Valdes-Corbeil, 2007). What
separates nomadic devices from more
classic desktop devices (desktop
computers, multimedia stations,
interactive kiosks, etc.) is the nature of
user interaction: while desktop devices
createa dyadic, one-to-one(user-system)
interaction, mobile devices entail a
triadic interaction between the user, the
system and the context of use (Tselios
et al., 2008;Christopoulou, 2008). When
introducingmobile devices in a libraryor
in a museum one possible scenario is
that the mobile will act as a “cognitive
tubular tool” (Tijus, 2009) that will
guide the visitor and help him
focusing his attention on the library
objects, improving the continuity of his
experience (continuity between pre/
during/post vis it and continuity between
different documents) and enriching his
learning experience. Another possible
scenario is that the nomadic device will
withdrawthe attention of the visitor from
the library objects, overloading his
Library Hi Tech News
Number 2 2011, pp. 15-18, qEmerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419051111135236 15
How to create new services between library
resources, museum exhibitions and virtual
collections
Claudio Vandi and Elhadi Djebbari
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