- Chris Chen
- Kirill Larshin
- Keaton Banik
- Zelin Zhou
Virtulib is an online library catered to bringing the browsing experience of in-person libraries to the comfort of your own home. Books and other items that can be ordered with our system are then delivered to your home for your convenience. Users then ship back books they must return with the help of our system.
This project has a focus on implementing user interactions and experiences (UI/UX) and does not include interactions with an online service, databases, or an actual library service.
The following features were added to our project:
- Item search
- Item browsing with recommendations
- Item checkout
- Item returns and shipping
- Item checkout notification
- Online virtual help and self-help
- Shopping cart
- Account settings
- Checked out items dashboard
This project was developed with Microsoft Visual Studio and has a focus on running the program using the IDE's debugger.
To run the program, ensure the correct NuGet packages are installed. If the correct packages are not installed, inside Visual Studio, right click the project and select "Manage NuGet Packages". Navigate through the UI to install the correct packages, which are listed in the file packages.config.
If the project has been opened by its .sln file in Visual Studio, press the Start button on the
top navigation bar in Visual Studio to run the project.
To close the program, navigate to the left navigation bar in our system and click on the Logout button to
gracefully exit the program.
Book data has been randomly generated and scrapped from the Open Library API using a Python script. The data has been serialized and placed into a .json file located in the data folder.
Users can 'log in' to our system, but this experience is simulated for visual purposes and automatically closes when form data is submitted.
Similarly, users can change their personal information in their settings page by clicking on the change button to
edit fields selected from a drop-down menu.
After users have logged into our system, users can either add books to their cart by clicking on books located in our Virtu Scrollers interface or from our general book search.
After they have done this, users can select their shopping carts so they can edit the items in their carts or choose to check out their items.
When users check out their items, users can either continue to browse for books or navigate to their items page to view their checked out items, wishlist, and other information about their books. Users can then initiate the return process for returning their books here.