During the book day, celebrated at The Library of the Universitat Jaume last April 18th, in the 20th anniversary of its inauguration, our colleagues Joaquín Torres Sospedra, Germán Mendoza and Miguel Matey presented the app Smart Library. The app allows users to consult the availability and location of the OPAC materials, and it also helps students to  find the location of the study booths within the Library.

The Smart library app – developed by GeotecUJI and Ubik GS in coordination with UJI’s library – has a long story.
In 2016 we thought the environment of a library could be an optimal place to test indoor technologies GEOTEC was working on. We contacted UJI’s library and prepared a first protoype of the Smart library tool (Aguilar-Moreno, E.; Montoliu-Colás, R.; Torres-Sospedra, J. Indoor positioning technologies for academic libraries: towards the smart library [Tecnologías de posicionamiento en interiores al servicio de una biblioteca universitaria: hacia la smart library]. El profesional de la información, 25 (2), pp. 295-302, 2016, ISSN: 1386-6710 doi:10.3145/epi.2016.mar.17). Later that year, Germán attended ESRI Spain conference and presented the firsts results in the presentation “UJI’s Smart library”
In 2017, INIT granted Mathematical modelling group and our group with INIT proof of concept, which gave us resources to continue working on this topic. The project ILDUM: Indoor Location Demonstrator in the University Campus dealt with the incorporation of location-based services in libraries.
Our student Miguel Matey was helping us out in all the way with different grants whereas he is studying Computer Science degree at UJI. Miguel even won a price awarded by Fundació Banco Sabadell with his poster “Interactive system for book search and users guiding in library environments through a mobile application”.

The Smart Library app is available for both Android and iOS systems. Look under UbikGS store.

Despite it could be considered a small project, we are very proud of it for many reasons. It is a real case of study and a test bed, which finally ended up in the transfer of indoor technologies we developed to our university. On the other hand, it possibilitates the learning process of Miguel from an early conception of a project to its real development.