Booksnake

Booksnake brings digitized cultural heritage materials out of online archives and into the real world. Point your iPhone or iPad at any flat surface, tap to place an item, and explore it at life size in your physical space — as if the original were really there in the room with you.

AIM. TAP. EXPLORE.
Booksnake is a tool for close looking — the careful, attentive examination of primary sources that is central to historical and archival research. Instead of squinting at a thumbnail on a screen, you can lean in to read fine handwriting, step back to take in a panoramic map, or walk around an item to examine it from every angle. As you move, Booksnake keeps the virtual item anchored down, exactly where you want it.

MORE THAN 4 MILLION ITEMS FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Booksnake offers access to more than 4 million digitized items held by the Library of Congress, including historical maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers, sheet music, and more. Search online catalogs, browse results, and add items directly to your personal research library — all from within the app. Items are rendered at life size, calculated from their actual physical dimensions.

Booksnake is built on IIIF (the International Image Interoperability Framework), the open standard used by leading galleries, libraries, archives, and museums worldwide to share digitized collections. Support for additional collections is in development.

TURN THE PAGES
For books, newspapers, manuscripts, and other paginated materials, Booksnake assembles each page into a virtual object you can leaf through page by page. Spread out a historical newspaper on your kitchen counter. Turn the leaves of an illuminated manuscript. Examine a ship's log entry by entry. Interacting with paginated materials in Booksnake is fluid and intuitive.

CREATE AND SHARE LISTS
Collect items from across the archive into Lists — curated selections you can title, describe, and share with students, colleagues, or collaborators. Use a List to guide a seminar through a set of primary sources, direct visitors to an exhibition's key objects, or share the materials behind a research project or public talk.

PRESENT WITH AIRPLAY
Mirror Booksnake to a TV or projector via AirPlay, or share your screen during a video call. Booksnake functions as a document camera for virtual documents: lead a class through an archival map, bring a manuscript into a lecture, or offer a conference audience a close look at an item that would otherwise require a trip to a special collections reading room.

FOR RESEARCHERS, EDUCATORS, AND CURIOUS EXPLORERS
Booksnake is a digital humanities project developed at the University of Southern California with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is designed for historians, librarians, archivists, museum educators, digital humanists, and anyone who wants a more immediate encounter with digitized primary sources. An introduction to the project appears in Digital Humanities Quarterly (vol. 19, no. 1, Winter 2025).

Booksnake is free. No in-app purchases. No subscription.

Booksnake is designed and built by Sean Fraga, Christy Ye, Henry Huang, Zack Sai, Michael Hughes, April Yao, Ben Crotty, Dhruv Kaul, and Tyler Anderson, with additional research by Yating Li, and with support from Peter Mancall, Amy Braden, Curtis Fletcher, Samir Ghosh, and Mats Borges.

Booksnake is produced at the University of Southern California. Booksnake is a joint project of the Humanities in a Digital World program in the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, and the Ahmanson Lab, a scholarly innovation space in USC Libraries. The Humanities in a Digital World program was funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The National Endowment for the Humanities provided major financial support for Booksnake's development via the Digital Humanities Advancement Grant program.