BibPhone – Adding Sound to the Children’s Library

In this paper, we describe the bibPhone, a prototype for recording audio annotations onto books and likewise functioning as the mediator for playing back annotations stored on books of the children’s library. Hereby the children’s library becomes an invisible landscape of sound tightly connected to the physical materials that is open for the users to explore and contribute to. The bibPhone exploits RFID and Bluetooth technology for establishing a wireless connection between the physical book and its metadata, which is stored in the central library database.