Touchscreens at the Hunt Library and the Hill Library

An in-house, custom web application for wayfinding, events, and other features is available on multiple touchscreens in the Hunt Library and the Hill Library.

Overview

Touchscreens in the Hunt Library and the Hill Library utilize our in-house, custom web application.

The video above is from 2017. Some features have changed since then.

The touchscreens offer:

Directions: Explore maps of the library and watch the screen draw a path from your current location to your destination.

Events: Find out what is going on in the library today, or coming soon, and get directions to the right room.

Rooms: Explore the library from a list of room names and find out where they are on maps.

Explore: This feature only appears at the Hunt Library. Learn about the bookBot, the library's architecture, the building's LEED Silver Status, and the chairs of the Hunt Library.

Busy: View current occupancy levels. 

Accessibility: Users can click "Move Buttons Down" to lower the entire interface for easy reach. 

The touchscreens do not offer interactivity in the form of checking out resources or reserving rooms. We have not chosen to manage the issue of multiple users logging in on these devices. 

History

Our touchscreens program began in 2016 at the Hunt Library. We conducted usability tests before and after deploying the screens in 2017.

The number of screens at the Hunt Library was initially 16, a quantity we reduced in 2018 to 12, and then in 2019 to six. As of 2026, there are only three. We now concentrate on the entrances and emphasize orientation and wayfinding.

As part of the 2020 renovation of the Hill Library, we added 6 touchscreens to the Hill Library.

The "Explore" section of the Hunt Library touchscreens mentioned above was more extensive for the first few years, offering photo galleries and videos of events in the Hunt Library's high-tech spaces. We retired these sections when it became too burdensome to continue develop and maintain this content.

How We Did It

We considered vendor platforms but in the end decided to develop our own in-house, custom web application. The original web developer in 2016 put it this way: we could learn a new complex application or instead rely on the web development skills we already have. 

The application integrates feeds from several web APIs, including our room reservation system, library event calendars in Google, library hours in the Drupal content management system, and occupancy data from Occuspace.  

The wayfinding feature was built on a Javascript library developed at UC Davis School of Law (which used to be available at https://law.ucdavis.edu/information-technology/projects/wayfinding.html but is no longer online as of 10/16/24). 

A complexity we have dealt with is that the Hunt Library's touchscreens are portrait-oriented while the Hill Library's screens are landscape-oriented. The choice of portrait screens at Hunt was made years before we developed the application and the content. Showing maps of the Hunt Library in portrait on the touchscreens while showing landscape-oriented maps on our website (the better way to show our building maps) is an unfortunate complication. In 2019 when we were ready to add touchscreens to the Hill Library, we chose landscape.

Over the years, many people in charge of digital signage at other libraries or similar, large buildings have asked us about our touchscreens. Josh Boyer's impression is that they are hoping to learn about an easy-to-implement solution and are disillusioned when they learn that they need an initial web development project and ongoing web development work. If you do have an in-house developer and are interested in creating your own version of this application, please feel free to contact us! While we aren't able to maintain a fully open-source version of this project, we are happy to share code and implementation tips.

Results

Team