m-Libraries Day 1

Lorcan Dempsey was the keynote speaker this morning. He talked about a whole host of things from why mobile technologies have such a high adoption rate to how users are changing their workflow. Probably the most thought provoking thing he said was that users now have the attitude of “you need to fit into my workflow. I won’t fit into yours.” This is something I’ve been trying to get across to my colleagues and superiors for quite a while as it relates to the library website. We spend an enormous amount of effort on the site when visiting the site isn’t part of students’ workflow. Lorcan touched more specifically on library websites later in the talk. My notes say “what’s in the website should be atomized & consumed by other people’s services”. I also was taken with his assertion that library websites hide people, are very anonmymous and whitewashed. This is certainly the case with UH’s site. I could never get much traction on the idea of having librarian photos on the site even though some subject liasions asked for it. The functionality exists but few liasions use it. Much of what Lorcan said wasn’t new to me, but seeing the talk reinforced a bunch of ideas and concepts I’ve been kicking around which was good.

Of the rest of the day’s sessions I have a few favorites. Ken Banks talk on his Frontline SMS software and how it is being used in developing countries was really interesting. Basically, the software faciliates communication both one and two way via cell phone in a text message like fashion. Using the software information can be both collected and distributed. I wonder about the potential applications of this types of software in libraries particularly to reach rural or under privileged population. Also Carie Page’s talk on “Reaching the Always On Generation Through Mobility” was really good. Hearing her talk about these users reinforced previous talks I’d heard on gen-Y but in a more specific mobile tech context.

Then evening conference dinner was very nice. I had the chance to sit with a pretty diverse group of people including a librarian from Shenadoah University, which is a small private college in the Shenandoah Valley. I was sort of surprised that a librarian from such a small college would find their way to m-Libraries. So I ask him both about his library and how it was that he chose to attend the conference. The conversation, in which he shared that his institution will be providing incoming freshmen with either an iPod Touch or iPhone, reminded me about the divide that exists between library haves and have nots. My colleague’s library has 5 librarians and almost no support from campus IT. So he and his fellow librarians there are facing the challenging of how to deploy services and content for iPod/iPhone with little expertise and resources. Yet, libraries exists which have already done some of this work. So why should his institution have to start from scratch. Too often we reinvent the wheel in libraries. We write code to do the same thing at many different institutions, we hack the same OPAC 35 different ways, we design our own individual mobile web presence. While we sometimes share our practices, we often don’t share our code, or work together to develop a single system rather than each maintaining our own. This is not only inefficient, it creates a divide between libraries that have the resources and willingness to innovate and create and those who don’t. I wish that there were some way to overcome this but that would take a degree of cooperation and centralization which libraries don’t seem capable of yet. It leaves me wondering what the future holds as we try to meet the challenges of rapid technology changes as individual institutions.