Three hundred thousand volumes, fitted to a phone.
A mobile library application for Baku State University. Find, reserve, and track books from a 300,000+ volume collection.
Every volume in the building, indexed once.
We started with the catalogue itself: cleanup, deduplication, authority records. The mobile app is the surface on top.
Six surfaces. One catalogue card each.
Find
Title, author, subject, ISBN. Type-ahead across the full collection.
Reserve
Hold a volume online. Pickup window auto-scheduled with the desk.
Wishlist
Save volumes you want to read later. Notified when stock returns.
Read online
Digital-first volumes opened in-app. No second login.
Track
Active loans, due dates, renewals. Reminders before fines.
Recommend
Surface adjacent reading from the librarian's curated lists.
The reader is on a phone, at the shelf.
Students do not start at a desk; they start in the stacks. Search has to find the volume; reservation has to clear in seconds; the app has to work in patchy library Wi-Fi.
Extensive testing with the university's diverse student body shaped the typography, the search behaviour, the reservation flow, the offline state. Accessibility considered a feature, not a checklist.
Three hundred thousand volumes. One pocket library.
