I've been aware of the term "Augmented Reality" for a while - but have always related it to gaming and things like "Second Life" and have never directly associated it with mobile apps or libraries.
But after coming across Arron Tay's article on Augmented Reality I'm actually quite excited.
As a librarian in a public library I'm rather attached to the book in paper format. I can use and appreciate electronic formats but I'm attached to the tactile experience of relaxational reading with a paper based book. Even with non fiction or study texts I find working with paper based medium more conductive to my thought process than working with ebook formats.
With all the talk lately in library circles regarding the rise of the ebook and the decline in circulation of traditional formats I was starting to worry that there would, for traditional formats be a lack of new development.
Shelf checking is the bane of a librarians existence - It's time consuming, fiddly and monotonous. But if the books are not filed correctly customers or staff cannot easily locate items, which can be both frustrating and embarrassing. When items cannot be found it adds to our workloads - looking for, writing off, Inter-Library Loaning or purchasing a new copy to satisfy the initial customer query.
Alot of people think RFID will help with this. And maybe in ideal cases it will, but given the offline/report based output of many RFID solutions and (in our case at least) issues with Call Number construction I have my doubts as to how effective it will be. An improvement yes, but the answer we expected ? likely not.....
Which brings us back to Augmented Reality
Seems great to me. An interactive, real time shelving guide.
From this great example and Arron's quick exploration it isn't hard to image a future where you can call up all of the same enhanced content (Syndetics, LibraryThing, etc)via your mobile phone or tablet while wandering the library shelves.
