The LITA Mobile Computing Interest Group meeting at Midwinter today highlighted an upcoming mobile service and an anecdotal study of mobile computing usage.
Evviva Weinraub and Hannah Gascho Rempel of Oregon State University presented their Book Genie mobile service, set to launch January 14.
Similar to Orange County (Fla.) Library System’s Shake It! app, Book Genie offers randomized recommendations from the library’s collections. Book Genie, however, is web-based. The university chose that approach for its flexibility. “We don’t know what kind of devices our users are using at any given moment,” Weinraub said. “We can create something and make it available, and as long as it works with the most up-to-date browsers, our users can access the information on whatever device they choose.”
Book Genie pulls from a limited selection of “fun reads,” including award-winning fiction, banned books, and other enjoyable titles that aren’t necessarily apparent when a student simply walks through the stacks. “We were responding to real questions that we get at the reference desk when students come up and ask for novels and fiction and fun reading,” Rempel said.
Book Genie was built using Ruby on Rails, XHTML, and CSS3, with a MySQL database running on a Unix system.
Jim Hahn of the University of Illinois spoke about a rapid ethnographic study he conducted to see how students might use mobile technology in the field. Specifically, he rode campus buses for three days in November and brought an iPad for students to use. While the study was too small to be truly representative, it did provide some intriguing anecdotal evidence of the kind of information students were looking for.
Students were more likely to seek information related to their classes after class than beforehand; on their way to classes they sometimes wanted class-related information, but they were as likely to look for unrelated information like the weather report. Other destinations lent themselves to more uniformity: Students on their way to the dining halls wanted that day’s menus.
“We say things like anywhere, any time information,” Hahn said. “But nobody’s anywhere, any time—they all have a specific place and time. People are sometimes overwhelmed with information.”
