Books that real­ly match the inter­ests of children!

A gam­i­fied inter­face for children

Cul­tu­ur­con­nect, the organ­i­sa­tion whose rai­son d’etre is dig­i­tal inno­va­tion in art and cul­ture, approached us with the request for an appli­ca­tion with a nov­el and child friend­ly inter­face. The goal was to guide and sim­pli­fy chil­drens’ quests for inter­est­ing books.

Bieblo encour­ages kids between 6 to 11 to play­ful­ly dis­cov­er books that match their inter­ests. The app shows them images of spe­cif­ic themes: fan­ta­sy, ani­mals, sports, … Swip­ing an image to the right means they like the theme. If they swipe left they aren’t inter­est­ed in it. Once the young lit­er­ary crit­ic has judged all the themes, they’re pre­sent­ed with a dig­i­tal book­case show­cas­ing 8 cov­ers. All of the sug­ges­tions are avail­able at their library at that moment and are a match with their inter­ests and age category.

From Open Data-hack­a­ton to a scal­able product

Cul­tu­ur­con­nect already obtained a proof of con­cept (POC) through an Open Data-hack­a­ton, and was look­ing to devel­op the project to a full-fledged scal­able prod­uct. Bits of Love had expe­ri­ence work­ing with their open data after pre­vi­ous­ly cre­at­ing a suc­cess­ful app for De Krook, the city library of Ghent. Rekin­dling that part­ner­ship for the Bieblo project felt like a log­i­cal decision

To present the data in an orig­i­nal way, we per­formed a tech­ni­cal analy­sis on how to com­bine the dif­fer­ent Cul­tu­ur­con­nect API’s into an effi­cient book rec­om­men­da­tion sys­tem. Based on Cultuurconnect’s datas­treams we build a scal­able and dynam­ic archi­tec­ture by using the newest Cloud tech­niques. We made sure to include fall­backs that ensure full per­for­mance of the appli­ca­tion, even when there’s a heavy serv­er load caused by many simul­ta­ne­ous users.

Cul­tu­ur­con­nect received full admin con­trol over the admin of the app. They’re able to acti­vate and man­age the Bieblo app indi­vid­u­al­ly for each par­tic­i­pat­ing library. Keep­ing in mind the dif­fer­ent types of libraries and wide range of devices they have avail­able, we focussed on opti­miz­ing the tool to also run on less recent appli­ances or touch devices.

‘Bieblo’ trav­elled a fas­ci­nat­ing tra­jec­to­ry: born as a con­cept dur­ing the Apps for Ghent hackathon ​‘Hack de Bib’ in 2015, raised as a chal­lenge in the ​‘Open sum­mer of code’, and grad­u­at­ed to a mar­ketable prod­uct. It’s a tale of inno­va­tion and entre­pre­neur­ship cul­ti­vat­ed out­side the start-up hype.