Student project led by David Sherwood

Hilary round 2015

See also Project presentation; Bibliotech (blog post)

For more information, please contact innovations@it.ox.ac.uk

ABSTRACT

Bibliotech is an app that will offer subscription access to enable students to access any textbook, at any time, on any device. Textbook prices in the US have risen over 82% in the last 10 years, compared to an overall increase in consumer prices of 28%. Our app will offer the lowest cost per book of any textbook option currently on the market. No search engine is currently able to extract information from the content of a catalogue of textbooks. At best the student can search within an individual e-textbook, in which case the search results are not filtered by relevancy they simply include all instances of the search term in chronological order. The app incorporates a search engine called FindX to extract key definitions, diagrams, examples and concepts from across the entire catalogue of textbooks. Only 11% of core textbooks at Oxford University are available in electronic form on OneSearch . Bibliotech is currently undertaking a trial providing first year undergraduate Chemistry students at Oxford with a select catalogue of books from OUP. £20,000 in funding will allow Bibliotech to expand the trial to include a greater number of students. We propose to utilise the funding to expand the trial catalogue to include all OUP chemistry books and offer the app free of charge to all Chemistry students at Oxford for Michaelmas 2015. The funding will also allow Bibliotech to customise the app to Oxford students including enabling FindX to search through all course materials provided to the students by the University.