Workshop Report: Transforming Library Services with Mobile Technology

Here’s a new article about the Mobile Imaginations workshop that opened the recent [September 2012] Fourth M-Libraries Conference: From Margin to Mainstream, at the Open University, UK.
The article is found on the Research Information site and was written by Ben Showers, a program manager at JISC in London.
From the Article:

So, what happens when you bring together 40 librarians, academics and library innovators interested in mobile technologies and services, from nine different countries and across sectors and put them in a room for a day to explore new ways of creating and prototyping library mobile services?
This might sound like the beginning of a joke, but the answer is more futuristic than funny. Indeed, the answers included an augmented reality app that students can use to look at a shelf of books and see the ‘hot spots’ where particularly popular books are located. There was also a library card on your phone, which is always with you and enables you to check out books as well as lookup content, and a social networking app for students on distance-learning courses that allows you to connect with people doing similar subjects or from the same institution.
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Increasingly, the word ‘mobile’ will begin to drop out of our conversations, as it embeds itself into the expectations of our everyday lives. Yet, its main message of mobility – the user as mobile – will remain, and the ways in which services will be developed and deployed will remain radically altered.

Read the Complete Article

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