University libraries offer a much bigger prospective than presenting students with quality research material and a place to study. They promote the idea of working together by providing group workrooms with workstations, beamers, and others modern tools. Such as any other institution, there is a tangible wish to continue to modernize, although often not possible due to financial constraints. However, this
reflects an untapped potential for university libraries: they present a window of opportunity for in-house developed projects. At the University of Applied Sciences Wildau, the collaboration between the library
and the Telematics team, a telecommunication and informatics degree course, have successfully proved this theory. Over the years, through this partnership, we have developed several great applications for large multi-touch displays, tablets and mobile devices, presented in previous IATUL conferences, and, now, we present our new project: an indoor positioning system. There has been an increasing trend in maps and localization systems within buildings over the last few years. Both large companies and open source map developers have been working on solving this problem and have done so successfully. Regrettably, most of these solutions are only possible in supported venues, mainly due to crowd sourcing solutions. The granularity of the end position is in these cases still very coarse, e.g. navigating to a store. Our solution covers both levels: a fine granularity within the library and a broader one for the rest of the
campus. By using the Bluetooth based iBeacon technology we have achieved an accuracy of around 2m, thus allowing library visitors to be navigated, for example, to a specific bookshelf. We are looking forward to share our experience on building this system, but especially on the feedback-development iteration between the library and the Telematics team.
