e-book reader

A new e-book reader should be on the market soon - and this one is a flexible e-book reader. It should have a robust, bendy screen.

M-libraries conference

A really exciting conference to watch out for this year is the second M-libraries conference in June in Vancouver, Canada. It will have examples of mobile technologies for use in libraries as well as papers about how mobile technologies are being used in libraries.

Have a look at the program.

Best practices in Virtual Reference

Fresh from the ALA Midwinter conference featuring WorldCat local panel presentations are two innovative approaches to improving reference service for our users: building a better search engine using the knowledge of reference librarians (David Lankes, Information Institute of Syracuse) and building a multilingual, multinational reference service (Paul S. Ulrich, Berlin Central and Regional Library), followed by a Q & A session.
These videos are well worth watching and considering within the light of your own reference service.

6 Technologies to Watch

The Horizon Report always makes interesting reading and this year is no different. The Horizon Report is an annual publication that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations. Each year the report identifies 6 emerging technologies to watch across 3 time frames - inside 1 year, 2-3 years and 4-5 years.

The 2009 Horizon Report focuses on the following technologies:
1 year or less - Mobiles and cloud computing
2-3 years - Geo-Everything and the Personal Web
4-5 years - Semantic Aware Applications and Smart Objects.

The report gives background to the technologies, reasons why they are having an impact and examples of how they are being used. I recommend that you have a look at the whole report but for now I want to probe your thoughts regarding mobile phones in libraries.

At my place of work we introduced an SMS service for hold notifications and it has been overwhelmingly popular. It's clear that almost all our users have a mobile phone and are happy to receive their notices via SMS. In addition, watching the students who use the library one could be forgiven for thinking that some catastrophic misfortune will descend upon them unless they text or call someone every 15 minutes. Combined with the rapid increase in the sophistication of devices such as the iPhone - web and GPS enabled, cameras, mulitmedia players, etc. - it seems to me an ideal way to connect with our community. But how? What services make sense if they are delivered via a mobile phone?

Let me give you a scnario. A fiction reader is standing in the shelves looking at a book. What if they could send the isbn, barcode or some other identifier of the book to a mobile application that told them whether they had read it before, provided the most recent patron review, listed other books by the same author or other books they might like based on recommendations from LibraryThing or Amazon?

Another one. What if a library member could sign up for SMS alerts on books that were currently on loan, which sent them a text when the book was returned? Do these types of services make sense? Are they useful?

Your turn...
Add your thoughts in the comments and tell me how libraries can make better use of mobile phones as a service delivery platform.