The Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory has piloted a number of projects looking at how their collections are accessed online. One of the most interesting is the Shelflife/LibraryCloud project.

LibraryCloud  aggregates collection and usage metadata from a number of different libraries and feed them into Shelflife, a sample front end for how this kind of information might be viewed and used by library patrons.

Main features of the interface include:

• use of the visual metaphor of a book shelf (Stackview) to help people browse popular titles trending at libraries across America
• all books appear in context and have their own page with recommendations and tags

At this stage Shelflife is a testing environment which is best introduced by taking the online tutorial, although you can also explore the site independently.