Conferences often highlight a paradox: new technologies using recent advances and innovations for business and learning at the height of marketing hype and rapid adoption can be most sensibly approached when you hear about everyday practicalities from small numbers of experienced people in person in a friendly social environment.
This book is a slim digest of knowledge delivered by around thirty international contributors based on the proceedings of the Fourth International M-Libraries conference held in Milton Keynes, UK in 2012. In its book form, it offers both a way to catch up with leaders in the field of using mobile technologies in libraries, especially higher academic libraries, and a means of judging how rapidly things are still changing since 2012.
Three sections, Transformation, Inspiration and Implementation provoke thought. Each chapter is commendably brief in its presentation of a single perspective, although there are illustrations, references, notes and further reading in many of them.
Surveys, concepts and research from India, UK, USA, Australia and Africa are presented, covering SMS content alert services, engagement with technology, user requirements and mobilizing academic content online, roving staff for enquiry handling and the impact of business service innovations. Not everything is straightforward: the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) concept is questioned, for example. Overall, the mood seems to be of cautious but pragmatic enthusiasm, which is probably the case in many libraries today, including public libraries.
For inspiration, readers can turn to this volume to find lessons from past technologies applied to libraries, strategies for dealing with tools at the optimum stage of the technology life-cycle, how to reach remote audiences, stimulate innovation in health information and increase the impact of your website. There are statistics useful for preparing business cases or writing a library student essay, as well as frameworks for best practice that should be used in staff training and development, enhanced by updated information from elsewhere.
If readers follow the ideas and inspiration described in the first two sections, what will happen? Some idea of possible outcomes is provided by the last section on implementation. These are wide ranging. Some studies are highly focused, such as the using Twitter to search the library catalogue at Utrecht University, but others review dynamic changes over time at Penn State University, in Qatar medical schools and at the National University of Ireland, for example.
In almost every case the authors predict further developments using mobile technologies in libraries, although few are specific about what these may be and most indicate the scope of change widening over time.
M-libraries are the digital equivalent of mobile libraries. They reach out to users and may address inequality of access. The traditional space limitations of mobile library vehicles are echoed in the small displays of mobiles demanding new approaches and understanding of users’ behaviour and expectations.
The m-library can ignore roads, driver skills, congestion or capital cost of vehicles.
The m-library must assess network availability and robustness, terms, conditions and performance, pricing, and issues around users with their own devices who may not always consider security of the library's services or convenience of other users who share network resources.
Short, but tweet.
