Inspiration
Our team is full of avid readers, though as college freshmen, we have far too little time to read all the books we want to. Even when we have the time to read, we struggle to find the physical books we want, constantly switching between library catalogues only to find that our desired novel isn’t available after all. As such, we wanted to minimize the time we spend combing through online library archives so that we could enjoy our time off(line). In an increasingly online age, we wanted to return to our local libraries for the community experiences offered by these reading refuges.
What it does
In order to encourage people to visit their local libraries rather than getting books online, we made a convenient platform to list the nearby locations of all the available books on your reading list. When a book is added to the reading list, the back-end Python program scrapes availability data from 26 different libraries across the Tulsa area and displays them in an easy-to-read table.
How we built it
Our platform is a Flask app with HTML and custom CSS formatting for the UI. To retrieve the data, we use Python and the web scrapers Beautiful Soup for static HTML and Selenium for dynamic JavaScript-loaded pages.
Challenges we ran into
Because we are a complete beginner team, we had no idea where to even start or what tools to use to turn our ideas into reality. Connecting all the different parts of our project proved a challenge, but we definitely learned a lot.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We made our first project! It has more functionality than we ever dreamed of 24 hours ago, with a complete UI and accesses our actual local public library.
What we learned
We learned how to leverage GenAI platforms to learn new tools, how to use web scrapers to get data off a website, how to run a Python script in a Flask app, and so much more! We also attended all of the workshops and learned how to incorporate new and advancing technologies into our lives. Although we often encountered merge conflicts in GitHub or undefined availabilities for books, we addressed these issues one at a time and worked together to create our first project!
What's next for More Books, Less Tech
Our biggest next step is to add more libraries to make the project relevant to more people. We worked on adding the UTulsa library, but ran into problems with scraping their catalog. In the future, we'd like the app to draw from any library, regardless of the API used by the library's website.
We also drafted an implementation of an AI chatbot that offered suggestions for books to read based on your current list, but we encountered issues fetching a database of books and genres, ultimately running out of time.
Ideally, we’d also add a login system so that users can save or download their lists; moreover, we’d love to import a reading list from Goodreads or StoryGraph to further personalize the experience for users. We’d also like to include a calendar system with events for nearby libraries to encourage people to get involved at their local library.
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