Development and Evaluation of BookReach: A System to Support Teaching Material Curation by School Libraries

Abstract

　School libraries can support teachers by selecting a set of books for classes, called teaching material curation. While increasing demand for inquiry-based learning attaches more importance to it, existing library tools have not supported it well. We developed a system to support teaching material curation, BookReach, which lets users obtain candidate books for teaching material by selecting the textbook chapter of a requested class. BookReach displays the covers of candidate books from the user's school library collection based on a table that maps relevant decimal classification classes to textbook chapters. We evaluated the system with three usability perspectives: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. We asked 18 school librarians to curate books for mock classes by using BookReach. The results showed the relevance of candidate books, less cost in time than OPAC, and user-friendliness in operation. The librarians' free-text questionnaire feedback revealed requests for book-display configuration and collection data editing.