Watch our tutorial
Shelflife reveals the Harvard Library with the Harvard community as your guide.
Please enjoy taking this public alpha version out for a spin. And let us know if you hit any potholes, if you have ideas for new features, or if you just want to chat: sheflife(at)law.harvard.edu
Community relevance
ShelfLife uses anonymized data about how the Harvard community interacts with works in its libraries, as well as information about which books have been ordered for courses, which ones have been called back early, etc., in order to provide a very approximate assessment of each work's relevance to users. We call this "ShelfRank," and it is expressed by the depth of the color blue of the item. ShelfRank comes in three different flavors, each weighting elements differently, depending on the user's interests.
Better-than-real shelves
ShelfLife uses the library's most familiar way of displaying works — shelves — but goes far beyond what real shelves can do. For one thing, ShelfLife shows on a single shelf all the holdings of all the libraries on campus. For another, it does not confine a work to a single shelf. With a click a user can see the same book shelved with other works under the same topic heading, with works by the same author, with works browsed by other users of the system, etc.