After yesterday’s opening keynote session at LITA National Forum, Past President Andrew Pace told me that there’s a lot of work involved in diversifying the keynote topics, which are set up to be “fact, fun, or fancy.” The Coalition for Networked Information Associate Director Joan Lippincott’s keynote was fraught cold, hard “fact” to support libraries’ need to go mobile.
“80.5% percent of college students today own a laptop,” she began. She added that five years ago that number was less than 50%. “66% of them own internet-capable cell phones,” she continued. For at least a short time after Dan Brown’s new novel The Lost Symbol came out, e-book sales topped print on Amazon, she added, although admitting the statistic was problematic.
Whether they like it or not, librarians would soon have to go mobile with their library’s data. And as the functionality of mobile devices continues to converge, the need to mobilize will only increase.
Despite their going mobile, though, patrons will still need librarians. Lippincott quoted American Libraries’ interview with Cokie Roberts: “The library might be in the cell phone, but we need the people in the building to put the library there” (AL, May 2009)
Web standards and APIs give us no shortage of opportunities to go mobile. And, as one audience member pointed out, end users already have access to a library’s entire holdings on their devices with WorldCat Mobile–if, of course, the library’s holding are up-to-date with OCLC. But Lippincott suggested that however easy it may be to start offering mobile services, libraries still need to develop a cohesive strategy.
As easy as it is to jump on board with mobile services on the web, it’s still unclear what type of mobile data would be most useful. Do users want full MARC records on their Blackberries, or do they just want to know how late the library is open on Sunday and when their books are due? Further, a university library’s cohesive plan to go mobile should include an eye toward what the university itself is doing. If universities are requiring, for example, that every student has an iPhone, then developing apps for the Palm Pre would be wasted effort.
The last, and perhaps most important part to the cohesive mobilization strategy is marketing. Users know what services are being offered, and marketing becomes all the more important when you consider that perhaps the most important target audience for marketing mobile services is those who never use the physical library.