Indoor Positioning Services & Location Based Recommendations
With beacon technology, real-time turn-by-turn directions and real-time recommendations in the print collection can be provided to a user’s mobile device. With the infrastructure and research trajectory developed for an augmented reality experiment ( http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/10881 ), researchers undertook an experimental project to incorporate Estimote beacons ( http://estimote.com/ ) into an Undergraduate Library collection so that students new to the environment can see the location of their mobile device within the library building, supporting wayfinding to items, and discovery of like items with location-based recommendations. Presenters will demonstrate the distributed computing processes and workflows necessary to integrate beacons into collections-based wayfinding and walk through key components for the recommendation algorithm used for “topic spaces” in collections. The experimental location‐based recommendation service is grounded in the advantages of collocation that support information discovery and are supplemented with existing ILS data -- e.g. sum total circulation of a particular item. Presenters will demonstrate techniques and approaches utilized in developing improvements for beacon precision, enabling increased location granularity in library environments, along with security considerations for location based services.
