vLibrary

Inspiration

To read a book all you require is an interest. The need to spend on books actually acts a roadblock in the learning curve. The community with people who are ready to share their collection of books can help in taking education to a next level.

What it does

vLibrary is a virtual library which has users who can add all the resources they are willing to share. Every user can filter their search for books based on location,title, author. Once they find the book of interest they can request for the book from the owner. Choosing a book closest to the borrower will enable easier lending and returning. This way people can share the books which they are not currently using. Education will no longer be considered with economy as a limiting factor.

How I built it

We used javascript as the base-development language, Bootstrap for the front-end design, esri for maps, firebase for storage and facebook for authentication and user profile management.

Challenges I ran into

We are using firebase, which did not have the feature of full text search. As we did not have time to develop elastic search, we ended up using regular expression matching which is inefficient

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We deployed the application already and it is available online. The feel of working for a cause gives more accomplishment than any other applications we have worked so far.

What I learned

We learnt firebase and we learnt how to deploy and work in a live application

What's next for vLibrary

This could be made into a mobile application although the current web application is mobile-friendly. Based on the usage frequency or privacy, people can drop and pick the books from nearby libraries instead of handling the transactions in person