Would you search the library on your mobile phone?

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

This led me to wonder if we should add buttons to the search results allowing people to easily email the reference, save it to Refworks, or bookmark it so that they can easily find it again later. At present the search results include some bibliographic data and a relevance score. The question is, would a significant number of library users find this useful? Space is at a premium on a mobile phone screen so is it worth taking it up with an ‘add to Refworks button’ rather than just listing more references?

Why you can’t find a library book in your search engine

This is an interesting article in the Guardian about searching for books online and finding your nearest library that has the one you want. I was surprised to read that OCLC are quite resistant to this idea. Their WorldCat is a great tool, but not everyone knows it’s there, so why not make it possible for search engines to access WorldCat and make sure it’s well badged in search results?

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