Digital Libraries Symposium-Mobile Technologies

Earlier on this year the Digital Libraries Symposium discussed mobile technologies and the impact on libraries. As we all know, huge numbers of people are now accessing the internet on hand held devices such as smartphones and tablets. The implications for librarians and libraries as follows:

1. Understand the user: user driven development produces a natural way of knowing the user's needs/wants;
2. User's context: this is the touchscreen and simple interactions are vital for mobile library services;
3. Mobilising all library services is unrealistic and unneccessarily expensive;
4. Libraries simply must make an effort to make their vital content available via mobile devices as users want information when they want it, where they want it and how they want it. This is no passing fad but a fundamental change in accessing information.

Mobile technologies_Issues for libraries

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