CULTech Blog

iPhone with eBook and information apps

The use of mobile devices for research, learning, teaching and creative expression is growing very rapidly. The most recent Horizon report from Educause and the New Media Consortium identifies Mobiles as a key educational technology trend with a time-to-adoption of one year or less. We’re exploring this issue for the Library and figuring out where we should be investing effort to support our mobile device users.

Last Saturday (4/18), the Cornell University Library Advisory Council met here at Cornell. As part of that meeting, Beth Anderson of Audible (now part of Amazon) and I gave a presentation on Mobile Devices and CUL. Here are some quick highlights:

• 29% of current college students read eBooks, as compared to 25% of 18-29 year-olds; 19% of 30-44 year-olds; and 14% of 45-64 year-olds [Source: Simba Information: Trade E-Book Publishing 2009].

• At Cornell, the use of powerful mobiles is growing, but it’s still early. Students mostly use laptops for information access.

• Within CUL, our current main Library web page is not very mobile-friendly (but we’re working on that).

• The use of mobile browsers at the Library web site increased by a factor of 75 times in the past semester, but it still represents less than 0.2% of Library web hits. Of that use, 55% is from iPhones/iPods and the rest from other mobile phones and devices.

• There is a new beta “Text a Librarian” service that allows users to send text messages to get answers to quick Library logistics and reference questions. You can find the details at the CULLabs web site.

You can also download and view the PDF version of our presentation: Mobile Devices and CUL (2.5MB). In it we gave a quick overview of the mobile landscape outside of and within Cornell, and then posed a series of questions for discussion by CULAC. The actual discussion mostly focused on the immediate importance of this area. Yes, growth is extremely rapid, but it’s still at a fairly low level. Yes, there are a number of possibilities, but is this the best place to spend the Library’s constrained resource? If I could summarize the group consensus, it would be “Take the relatively easy, inexpensive, high-payoff steps to support mobiles now, and actively monitor mobile use and demand for mobile services to decide what to do in the future.”

So, what is the Library doing now? The Library web group in cooperation with the Library Outside the Library team (LOL) is looking into making the main Library web site (based on Drupal) more friendly to mobiles. The New York Public Library mobile site is a great example of what can be done. LOL is also looking at a possible student project to build a simple iPhone app to access the Library, along the lines of the one created by the DC Public Library.

Another interesting approach is to build on the mobile-friendly environments that are being built by others out on the web. Flickr has a very nice mobile site, and the LOL group is looking at making Cornell images available on Flickr Commons. As another example, if we link from the catalog to a public domain book at Google Books, then a user can view that book using the Google Books Mobile web interface.

If we’re lucky, and the resource is sufficiently important, we may not need to do anything at all. The arXiv.org physics/astronomy/CS pre-print archive already has a mobile site available. There are also three different iPhone apps to access arXiv – here’s the author’s description of one them – arXiview. If we have sufficiently valuable resources and we make the APIs available, our user community may just develop the mobile-friendly applications themselves.

There may still be a question of how soon mobiles will hit and how hard they will impact, but there is no question that it’s going to happen. Perhaps the iPhone is the tipping point, with a range of applications and capabilities that make it a totally compelling information tool. I certainly use mine for many purposes: constant awareness and updates (Twitterfon, Facebook, Google Reader Mobile), information seeking (Wikipanion, Google), news (WSJ, NYTimes, AP, USAToday), eBooks (Kindle, Stanza, Classics), as well as web browsing, email, and even (occasionally) as a phone.

This past January, Lorcan Dempsey of OCLC wrote an excellent article in First Monday: “Always on: Libraries in a world of permananet connectivity”. Here’s a quote that captures the challenge that libraries face: “[T]he library will have to meaningfully synthesize a range of products and services from multiple sources, specialize them for particular users and uses, and then mobilize them into a personalized, socialized individual user experience.” This is already happening out there in the big, wide world of the web, and if CUL is to remain relevant and useful to our scholarly community, then it will have to happen here as well.