Welcome to Finder!

What inspired our project?

For generations, libraries have relied on physical and visual methods to categorize and organize books. While parts of these systems, such as library catalogs have begun to modernize, many physical systems of organization still remain. As our society grows more technology oriented and accustomed to having pertinent information at our fingertips, physical libraries are having a hard time competing as an everyday source of knowledge. The problem is, because of the absence of funding in the library industry, libraries often do not receive the focus and attention of the development community. Our project intends to address these difficulties, and facilitate library access in out digital age.

What does Finder do?

Our project is designed to provide our users with a seamless transition between the physical and digital worlds. The book-finding process begins when a user obtains a call number for a book they are interested in finding, and navigates to the general location of the book. With Finder, this is where the user's work ends, and ours begin. Users will be able to point their phones at the the shelves, and it will guide them to the correct location. When Finder spots your book, it will highlight it on your screen, making the book-finding process fast, accessible, and efficient.

What's next for Finder?

Future Iterations of our project will be geared towards:

• Partnering with libraries to incorporate library databases, search engines, and floorplans into the Finder app to provide a fuller experience for our users.
• Developing Finder as a modular drop-in framework that can be used to help locate resources in other settings, such as warehouses and archives.
• Developing Finder to not only locate books and resources on the shelves, but also assist in shelving, and locating the place where a book should be returned to.
• The addition of unobtrusive, informational prompts at key stages of the book finding process to learn more about how libraries are organized, and how resources can be found manually.

How we built it

We built this app by using flutter and dart as its main language. We also worked on developing an OAK-D based machine learning prototype that can carry out the intended operations performed by the app.

Challenges we ran into

The challenges we ran into were that we had to learn an entirely new language and interface. The other problem was that it was our team's first time joining a hackathon, so we had little direction or idea to follow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of being able to learn a new language, dart, and was able to produce something in the 24 hrs.

What we learned

We learned that maybe we bit off more than we can chew but worked through it together as a team and was able to just learn and have fun along the way in this event.'

What's next for Finder

Finder should be able to evolve and go beyond that of a normal book or call number finder and be able to apply this technology to different works and fields as a sorter or an identifier. The use of TensorFlow was also destined to be implemented, so if we were able to add it would be able to work faster than finding things by hand.

Built With

• dart
• flutter