BookTrail is a personalized discovery platform designed to connect people with the National Library of Israel (NLI) collections, in the context of their searches and everyday lives.
Developed as a competition entry for digital interfaces for the National Library of Israel, the project was deeply personal for our team: as designers of books and media, some of which are held in the NLI collection yet remain difficult even for us to find, we understand firsthand that discovery, exposure, and association in shared context are the very essence of contemporary library culture.
The Problem: The newly inaugurated NLI holds over 5 million items, including the world’s largest Hebraica and Judaica collections. But you can’t search for what you don’t know exists. In a media-saturated world where attention is hard to capture, countless books and media remain undiscovered.
The Solution: BookTrail meets users where they already are, physically and digitally, delivering contextual, personalized NLI content discovery, recommendations, and engagement through three core features:
In-Situ Discovery: contextual, location and interest-aware recommendations (e.g., walking on Bialik Street triggers relevant poetry collections).
Live Shelf: a personal archive that continuously surfaces related NLI content based on saved items, connecting like-minded people with shared interests.
Chain Story: lets users attach their own media to NLI items, building a crowdsourced, evolving cultural layer around the collection.
The Technology: A knowledge graph-based recommendation engine combining machine learning, AI, and collaborative filtering, delivering discovery through context, not just search.
The Impact: BookTrail brings the library to the people, making Israel’s cultural heritage discoverable anywhere, by anyone, in the moment it’s most relevant.
