Our school had a problem that not a lot of people talked about — we had books, but no real way to use them. There were books that had been donated to the school and others that had just been sitting around collecting dust. At the same time, a lot of our students wanted to read but didn't have any way to get books outside of school. It didn't make sense to us that the books were right there and students still couldn't access them in any organized way. So we decided to do something about it. That's how The Book Hub was born.
This project actually grew out of another EAST project we had already completed — the Student ID System. After we pulled that off, it gave us the confidence to take on something bigger. We went to our facilitator, Mr. McIntosh, and asked him what it would take to build a school library. As usual, he didn't tell us. He just looked at us and said, "Work the Problem." That's his way of telling us to do our research, figure out what the real issue is, and start from there.
So that's exactly what we did. We reached out to a local library and asked them how they actually run things — what their process looks like, how they track books, and what systems they use. That conversation opened our eyes to how much goes into running even a small library. From there, we started building The Book Hub one piece at a time.
First, we met with our principal to figure out the school's checkout policy, funny enough there wasn't one. He told us that we should come up with some ideas and bring it to him for approval stuff like: how long students would be allowed to keep books, when students would be allowed to go to the library, what to do if a book isn't returned and fines. But figuring out the rules was just the beginning. We then had to go through every single book and scan each one into a catalog we created ourselves. On top of that, we needed a system that could actually track which books were being checked out and by whom.
After some research, we found that we could use a Google Form connected to a Google Sheet to handle checkouts. Students could scan the ISBN number on a book and select whether they were checking it in or out. We also built a list of student names linked to their ID numbers so we could track who had what book. But then we ran into another problem — Google Sheets had no way of knowing what book matched which ISBN, and it couldn't automatically calculate due dates.
We brought that problem back to Mr. McIntosh, and he connected us his old friend from high school, our community partner for this project, Mr. Demarcus Thomas. Mr. Thomas is a real, professional coder who has worked with multiple companies, Textron Aviation and Google. He lives in Kansas and was willing to talk with us via google meets. He helped us write a script that we embedded directly into our Google Sheet. That script solved both problems — it could recognize ISBNs and automatically calculate when books would be due. Once we linked everything together, The Book Hub actually worked.
What makes this project unique is that it wasn't just a school project — it became a real, functioning library for our school. Students can now check out books, and we can track everything digitally. We built it ourselves, with help from a real professional, using tools that are accessible and free. There was no app to download and no expensive software. The only thing we had to get was scanners and our principal bought those. We honestly made something cool and real out of nothing.
Our team members who made The Book Hub possible are Tania Crosby, Jurnee Murry, Dayana Gomez, Kendra Garrido, and Phoenix Wilson. Every one of them put in real work to catalog books, test the system, and make sure everything ran the way it was supposed to.
The next phase of The Book Hub is something we're already planning. Right now, students have to manually type in their ID numbers to check books out. We want to change that by connecting the barcodes on the Student IDs we already designed to the system, so that scanning a student ID will automatically pull up their information. The challenge is that the barcodes on the current ID cards need to be changed, which means we'll have to reissue cards. It's a big next step, but it's the kind of problem we know how to work through now.
This project taught us that solving one problem often leads you to the next one, and that's not a bad thing — that's just how real work goes. We started with a pile of books and a question. We ended up with The Book Hub — a working library system built by us. We're proud of what we built, and we're not done yet.