— By David Sherwood, project manager of the 2015 Bibliotech IT Innovation student project —

Bibliotech is the Spotify for Textbooks. Undergraduates find textbooks awkward and overly expensive. We make the entire reading list affordable and provide an advanced search engine navigates for you. We are currently scaling our chemistry and biomedical science catalogues licensed from Oxford University Press across the UK, before expanding internationally.

Our Oxford IT Innovation Project provided free access to our app for Oxford University chemistry undergraduates and to customise our app and advanced search engine for their needs. The funding came at a critical moment before we had finished our pilot which then enabled us to raise a seed investment round. Over the course of the project our search engine developed from a simple index matching to being able to return definitions, diagrams and examples most relevant to the students assessment question.

I would recommend the IT Innovation Challenge to all Oxford students and staff interested in developing an app. Taking a problem encountered by students and staff at the University may happen to address a much wider market.