Case Study: University of Virginia accelerates marginalia discovery and streamlines data entry with AppSheet

UVA Library Mines for Marginalia with Project Management Apps

University of Virginia’s Book Traces project, which crowdsources the discovery and documentation of marginalia in old library books, was hampered by slow, error-prone workflows: students used bulky laptops, spreadsheets, digital cameras and separate Google Forms to record locations, conditions and photos, creating hours of back-office matching work. With limited time and a constrained grant budget, project manager Kristin Jensen needed a fast, low‑cost way to streamline field data entry without hiring a developer.

Jensen built mobile apps on AppSheet that integrate directly with spreadsheets and run on iPod Touches, letting students capture book data and photos in the stacks and use features like a completion dashboard and multi‑volume entry helpers. The result: nine library-specific apps in use, near‑real‑time photo tagging and centralized updates, dramatically faster workflows, much less backend labor, and increased productivity as the team scales the project.

University of Virginia

Kristin Jensen

Project Manager