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.

3.6 MILLION ITEMS FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Booksnake offers access to more than 3.6 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 Andreson. 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.