Athena helps small libraries digitize their catalog fast: point the camera at a book, and OCR plus barcode scanning fill in the metadata automatically.
A built-in translation tool and an AI chat assistant answer common borrower questions without staff intervention.
Key contributions
- Built OCR-based book intake that cut manual cataloging time significantly.
- Added barcode scanning with automatic metadata lookup.
- Shipped an in-app translator for multilingual borrowers.
- Designed a smart FAQ chatbot trained on library policies.
The challenge
OCR accuracy dropped sharply on worn paperback covers and handwritten annotations.
The solution
Added a lightweight image pre-processing step (contrast normalization and crop detection) before OCR, plus a manual-correction UI that feeds edits back to improve matching over time.