Libraries and Mobile: Why You Should Care
NEWS, mobile, • Comments (1)
Oct 15
Joan Lippincott of CNI gave a wonderful opening keynote in early October at the LITA National Forum, discussing the opportunities and challenges represented by mobile devices for those in the information community. A brief report of her comments is available here. Equally knowledgeable, Liz Lawley of the RIT Lab for Social Computing gave the closing keynote.
If you weren't able to attend the LITA discussion of mobile
devices in libraries at ALA Annual this past July, both David
Lee King and
Jenny Levine provided notes from that event. Mobile devices are
one of the major areas of interest for libraries as patrons
Content providers may or may not feel up to speed on the various
issues surrounding mobile devices and the creation of applications
for delivering content to such devices. There's still time to
register to attend the NFAIS event, Mobile
Delivery of Content, to be held Friday, October 30, in
Philadelphia. Experts already working in this area, such as
James Wonder of the American Institute of Physics
(AIP) and Kent Anderson of the New England
Journal of Medicine (NEJM) will be speaking!
For the generation growing up with web-enabled mobile phones, discovery and access are one in the same. Not only do they want their phones to have access to a first rate discovery layer, they want that discovery layer to link seamlessly into objects in a library's eresources, whether text, video, audio, or a file in a desktop application format. Libraries, and the vendors that support the, that can deliver this today (or soon) will have a competitive huge advantage.