Award-Winning App Helps Students Navigate Library Shelves

St. John’s University has recently been honored with the Campus Technology Impact Award for the original development of the BKFNDr mobile app, which uses beacons, coordinates, and mapping to assist St. John’s students in navigating dense library shelves—quickly getting them to the books they need.

The award is given annually by Campus Technology to institutions that drive new and innovative technological changes. This year, St. John's was one of only two institutions to receive the honor in the Student Systems and Services realm. The awards are competitive, and past winners include institutions such as the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Michigan, and Johns Hopkins University.

The concept for the mobile app was developed a year ago by Valeda Dent, Ph.D., Dean, St. John’s University Libraries.

“The Web and Emerging Technology Group—made up of faculty from the Queens and Staten Island Libraries—then further expanded my original idea, and we worked closely with a developer, Kiichi Takeuchi, to build it,” she said.

The St. John’s University BKFNDr app provides a way for students to navigate the often confusing stacks at libraries on both the Queens and Staten Island campuses so that they can locate relevant materials at the shelf level. It required the placement of beacons on the library shelves of the circulating collection, and then the mapping of each beacon to an exact location. These locations were defined by shelf ranges, thus allowing each beacon to be mapped to a specific shelf content area.

The number of beacons on any given shelf is related to the signal range of the beacons, and the degree to which those signals can be kept from interfering with one another. Beacons placed too close might give students multiple location readings for the same item, and beacons placed too far apart might not get students close enough to the materials they are seeking.

The development of the mobile app will be detailed in an upcoming article in the peer-reviewed journal Code4Lib. BKFNDr is now available in the Apple and Google Play stores.

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