An Intelligent Library App by Social Recommendations

Abstract

The mobile application called ‘Mobrary’ is designed to provide native mobile user experience for accessing most of the CityU online library functions. Besides, social and mobile technologies are deeply integrated into this app to enable students discovering books of interest. Students can write book reviews, leave comments, give ratings and share these among their peers through Facebook. Those data will then be meshed into the search results to provide relevant book recommendations to the users. Moreover, user can use the phone’s camera to read the barcode (ISBN) on books and bring up reviews and bibliographic information. This is particularly helpful if someone in store is not sure whether to buy a book. Therefore, the proposed mobile application is an intelligent and social capable alternative solution to the existing mobile catalogue (the mobile web version) for CityU library. I strongly believe that, in a discovery based curriculum, knowledge should be generated from both teachers and students, and peers contribution should be a major element of the course of learning.