Elsevier today announced the winners of the Apps for Library Idea Challenge at the 2011 Charleston Conference in Charleston, SC. The international competition encouraged librarians and information professionals to conceptualize solutions to the challenges that they and their constituents face in addressing the search and discovery of information.
Following the submission period (May 13 to September 2, 2011), an international panel of judges selected 10 app concepts as finalists. The community was invited to comment on the finalists and vote for their favorite idea. Two grand-prize winners were selected – one by the panel of judges and one by community vote:
Judge’s Choice Grand Prize: Journals/Conferences @ Your Fingertips, proposed by Low, Ke Khoon, a librarian at the National University of Singapore, would identify the top 20 journal or conference titles relating to the user’s search results, ranked by number of relevant articles, and deliver RSS feeds with table of contents for these journals.
Community Choice Grand Prize: JTOCs 2 Go, proposed by Andrea Szwajcer, a librarian at the University of Manitoba, Canada, would enable users to customize a journal table of contents notification service with full-text viewing and sharing of articles in a clean, easy-to-read format.
“The Apps for Library Idea Challenge is another example of Elsevier asking the librarian community which solutions they need most in search and discovery platforms,” said Rafael Sidi, Vice President Product Management, Applications Marketplace and Developer Network, Elsevier. “I’d like to thank all who participated in the submission of ideas and joined in the conversation. We’re looking forward to developing new applications with the developer community based on the proposed concepts.”
Elsevier will collaborate with the idea creators to develop the two winning app concepts for inclusion in SciVerse Applications. Additionally, each grand-prize winner will receive €750 (approximately $1,000). For more information on the winning ideas as well as the other eight finalists, please visit www.appsforlibrary.com.
