Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

LibraryLens: An Interactive Tool for Exploring and Arranging Digital Bookshelves

Trevor DePodesta, Johanna Beyer

TL;DR

LibraryLens addresses the mismatch between digital book management and the tactile spatiality of physical shelves by providing an immersive 2D representation of a personal library, augmented with metadata from ISBNdb and AI-driven normalization. The system imports data from Goodreads exports, resolves ISBNs, and renders interactive shelves with drag-and-drop rearrangement and color-encoded spines, while acknowledging spine-color fidelity limits and metadata gaps. Through three usage scenarios and informal playtests, the work demonstrates practical workflows for indecisive organizers, informed browsers, and digital bibliophiles, highlighting granular control and consistent visual encodings as key benefits. As a proof-of-concept, LibraryLens offers a bridge between physical shelf-awareness and digital organization, enabling exploration and social sharing without physical space or manual effort.

Abstract

Existing digital book management platforms often fail to capture the rich spatial and visual cues inherent to physical bookshelves, hindering users' ability to fully engage with their collections. We present LibraryLens, a novel visualization tool that addresses these shortcomings by enabling users to create, explore, and interact with immersive, two-dimensional representations of their personal libraries. The tool also caters to the growing trend of social sharing within online book communities, allowing users to create visually appealing representations of their libraries that can be easily shared on social platforms. Despite limitations inherent to the metadata being rendered, formative evaluations suggest that LibraryLens has the potential to lower the barrier to entry for users seeking to optimize their book organization without the constraints of physical space or manual labor, ultimately fostering deeper engagement with their personal libraries.

LibraryLens: An Interactive Tool for Exploring and Arranging Digital Bookshelves

TL;DR

LibraryLens addresses the mismatch between digital book management and the tactile spatiality of physical shelves by providing an immersive 2D representation of a personal library, augmented with metadata from ISBNdb and AI-driven normalization. The system imports data from Goodreads exports, resolves ISBNs, and renders interactive shelves with drag-and-drop rearrangement and color-encoded spines, while acknowledging spine-color fidelity limits and metadata gaps. Through three usage scenarios and informal playtests, the work demonstrates practical workflows for indecisive organizers, informed browsers, and digital bibliophiles, highlighting granular control and consistent visual encodings as key benefits. As a proof-of-concept, LibraryLens offers a bridge between physical shelf-awareness and digital organization, enabling exploration and social sharing without physical space or manual effort.

Abstract

Existing digital book management platforms often fail to capture the rich spatial and visual cues inherent to physical bookshelves, hindering users' ability to fully engage with their collections. We present LibraryLens, a novel visualization tool that addresses these shortcomings by enabling users to create, explore, and interact with immersive, two-dimensional representations of their personal libraries. The tool also caters to the growing trend of social sharing within online book communities, allowing users to create visually appealing representations of their libraries that can be easily shared on social platforms. Despite limitations inherent to the metadata being rendered, formative evaluations suggest that LibraryLens has the potential to lower the barrier to entry for users seeking to optimize their book organization without the constraints of physical space or manual labor, ultimately fostering deeper engagement with their personal libraries.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 21 sections, 3 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Existing Book Cataloging Tools
  4. Reading as a Social Experience
  5. Aligning with Mental Models
  6. Browsable Visualization as a Discovery Tool
  7. LibraryLens
  8. Metadata Normalization
  9. Implementation
  10. Evaluation
  11. Usage Scenarios
  12. Indecisive Organizer
  13. Informed Browser
  14. Digital Bibliophile
  15. Domain User Feedback
  16. ...and 6 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Cover images are broken into pixel arrays, converted to RGB color space, and quantized with restricted palettes (n=4) before the primary remaining color is isolated and returned to render the book spines. The top and bottom RGB histograms reflect (bin=256) and (bin=24), respectively.
  • Figure 2: LibraryLens pipeline. User exports ISBNs from Goodreads $\rightarrow$ Raw metadata fetched from ISBNdb $\rightarrow$ Claude normalizes genre + age facets $\rightarrow$ Cover images are loaded and quantized $\rightarrow$ Renderer streams an organized shelf scene to the front-end
  • Figure 3: The same shelf with four alternate spine color encodings to understand global patterns at a glance. From left to right: (a) Original spine art; (b) Reading-age palette exposes a lack of adult literature; (c) Genre coloring reveals overwhelming Fantasy and Science Fiction dominance; (d) Goodreads reviews add a visual dimension to SBS, immediately drawing attention to the highest and lowest rated novels.