Open University Library mobile search interface

The Open University library is developing a mobile search interface as part of the next phase of its m-library service development. When I presented an update on our mobile library service developments as part of a roundtable discussion at the Handheld Learning conference last week I had a discussion with an OU Associate Lecturer about how he would find this useful. Apparently he regularly receives requests from his students for recommendations of journals or journal articles. He felt that being able to search the library catalogue on his mobile phone in order to verify reference details would be very helpful as he receives these enquiries during the day while he’s at work.

Open University mobile library search results screen

It’s difficult to type anything more than a short message using the on-screen keyboard, the Internet browsing is slow, patchy and limited, Apple is proprietary about the apps you can install on it and it handles like a bar of soap, which means I’d have to cover its beauty with a grippy latex cover or I would just drop it all the time.  In addition to all this, apparently they’ve been known to catch fire.

People often ask me for advice about buying a new mobile phone and I always find it a difficult question to answer because it’s a very individual and personal decision. In these days of converged, increasingly powerful devices, it depends on what you want to use the phone for. I know that by far the majority of people in reality just want to use their phone for making calls and sending text messages, but others may find that a good camera is more important than a good web browser, or that being able to play music is more important than accessing email.

I would like a touch screen phone with good hand-writing recognition and good battery life than I can use for taking notes at meetings and conferences. A phone that starts up quickly and works seamlessly. I also want to be able to sync it with my calendar, whether I use Outlook, GCal or both. And because photography is a hobby of mine, I want it to have a good quality camera with at least 4x Optical zoom and a flash. I’d also like GPS that allows photo tagging and can help me find my way whether I’m walking or driving. A fast 3G connection and a good browser, such as Opera Mini would also be a necessity.

If it happened to also have a good built in ebook reader, that would be a bonus, especially if it could cope with multiple formats from different ebook suppliers.

Finally, I would still want to be able to download extra applications to personalise and customise the device as I can with my current phone.

Is this all too much to ask? Until recently it has been. Converged devices haven’t been able to fulfil all their functions as well as dedicated devices, but that’s starting to change. Already the iPhone and the Nokia N95 are going some way towards my ideal device.

I’m looking forward to seeing the Sony Ericsson Idou, which has a 12 megapixel camera after being somewhat disappointed by the Sony Ericsson X1.

The HTC Magic (using the Google Android operating system) looks interesting too, although it only has a 3.2 megapixel camera.

This is an interesting concept, predicated on the idea that the added value publisher provide is not so much the printed content as the proof-reading, editing and peer review,verification and now hosting services which give that content authority and make it accessible to a wider audience.

But if content is freely available on the web, what is the role of libraries?

Our role has already largely changed from that of gatekeepers to that of experts in information retrieval, or experts in the use of varied and convoluted database interfaces. We’re also teachers of information literacy skills and experts at filtering and aggregating content for use in courses, so already our role is not all about providing access to content.

However, as the role of publishers changes, perhaps the way libraries provide added value access to content will change too. Rather than subscribing to collections of electronic resources in order to make the content available, perhaps we will subscribe to them in order to subsidise the cost of print on demand for students at our institution, or to subscribe to extra services such as an allowance for downloading content to a mobile device, or being able to annotate comment and bookmark it.

It was suggested that one of the paid-for services publishers might offer around free content is access to the data supporting research, so academic libraries could also help researchers at their institution gain bulk access to research data, where an individual might have to use a more expensive pay-per-view model.

I also wonder whether libraries have a role in hosting user-generated content for people within their institution.

• SIR JOHN DANIEL – President and CEO, Commonwealth of Learning
• LORCAN DEMPSEY – Vice-President and Chief Strategist, OCLC
• KEN BANKS – Founder of Kiwanja.net
• CARIE PAGE – EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Program Coordinator

June 22 is an optional pre-conference workshop day, followed on June 23-24 by a full program of keynotes, sessions, activities and social events. To view the conference program and to register visit:http://m-libraries2009.ubc.ca/ Space is limited so register early! The conference is being held on the beautiful University of British Columbia campus, situated on the edge of oceans and forests in Vancouver, BC. Vancouver is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations and is the host city for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. Take advantage of this natural locale by participating in our ‘be mobile’ series of outdoor and cultural tours and activities.

A number of accommodation choices are available on the UBC campus starting at the very affordable rate of $49 per night. For more information please visit the website or contact Maeliosa Griffin at mlibraries.2009@ubc.ca On behalf of the International Organizing Committee, we look forward to seeing you in Vancouver for M-Libraries 2009. Nicky Whitsed, Open University Leonora Crema, University of British Columbia Library Conference Co-Chairs

I think library users, especially those enrolling for university this year, will expect to be able to access at least some library services via mobile devices and I think it’s important that we meet that demand. Of course, my own project for the Arcadia Fellowship could prove me entirely wrong!

One interesting thing to note from the post above is that there is now a an M-Libraries page on the LibSuccess wiki.

Despite the internet‘s origins as an academic network, when it comes to finding a book, e-commerce rules. Put any book title into your favourite search engine, and the hits will be dominated by commercial sites run by retailers, publishers, even authors. But even with your postcode, you won’t find the nearest library where you can borrow that book. (The exception is Google Books, and even that is limited.)

That’s strange, because almost every library has an electronic database of its books – searchable either at the library’s own website or via its local council. The wrinkle is that at the book level, those databases aren’t accessible to the search engines; and you may not be able to search all the libraries in your area at once.

Yet there is an alternative that few people seem aware of: Worldcat (worldcat.org), which offers web access to the largest repository of bibliographic data in the world – from the 40-year-old Ohio-based non-profit Online Computer Library Center (oclc.org). But Worldcat suffers from the same problem on a larger scale. OCLC shares only 3m of its 125m records with Google Books; none of them show up in an ordinary search.

Apparently OCLC are considering making WorldCat records easier to search, though, according to this post: OCLC, Record Usage, Copyright, Contracts and the Law

Scope

This will be a three month project including

• focus groups with Cambridge Librarians to scope out possible m-libraries services
• prototyping of 3 services in the following areas
  • skills – mobile Safari
  • content – quick reference
  • mediated services – helpdesk access

• a questionnaire about prototype and other services, as suggested by focus groups, to a fixed number of Cambridge University and Open University students
• analysis of questionnaire results (quantitative and qualitative)

Deliverables

1. Proposed service models for both campus-based and distance learning academic libraries.
2. A website making the methodology and results from the project available to other UK Academic Libraries, and allowing them to input their own data and analysis if they choose to run the questionnaire with their own students.
3. A paper to be presented at the M-Libraries conference in June 2009, including an analysis of environmental factors affecting mobile library services, such as cost and availability of institutional text messaging services or mobile broadband, and library user communication behaviours.

I have been developing a list of further ideas for m-library services which will be included in the survey of library users, but will not all be prototyped. Comments and suggestions for other services would be welcome.

A friend passed on this video of the author talking about the subject matter of the book. He does a good job of condensing the premise of the 233 page book into a one hour presentation. [On a side note, it's interesting how much non-text visual media can speed up understanding....]

Everything is Miscellaneous essentially makes the same point as Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability. When you take away the physical limitations of only being able to categorise things in one place at a time, you can make it very easy to categorise things by the user’s need at the time, rather than by the intended purpose of the thing or by the context understood by the person doing the categorisation. I think what both of these authors are saying is that we need to get our heads around this faster and stop trying to categorise digital data the way we categorise physical things. It’s the connections we make between bits of digital data that give them meaning, rather than the data itself.