userslib.com

Fantastic, must read article from Craig Mod about the future of print and digital books.

http://craigmod.com/journal/ipad_and_books/

NCSU recently launched a new mobile website – and it’s very impressive!

It offers standard features like catalog search, locations & hours, etc., but also allows you to view a map of where available computers are and webcams of the libraries including the line at the coffee shop. Love it.

Read about the interface: www.lib.ncsu.edu/m/about.html
View a demo of the site: www.lib.ncsu.edu/m/home/?browse=iphone

They also made a fun video to promote it:

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen released a study this week about mobile usability: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html.

The result? “The mobile user experience is miserable.”

Here are some highlights:

• The average success rate for mobile websites was 59% compared to 80% for regular sites.
• Small screens are limiting since they have to show less at a time which results in more clicks and a heavier reliance on short term memory.
• Input is awkward and more error prone due to more scrolling, tiny buttons and links, tiny keyboards, etc.
• Connections are still slow.
• Sites that have a mobile specific interface have a higher success rate (64%) compared to regular sites (53%).
• If a site has a mobile version, make it easy to find. Best technique is to auto-sense users’ devices and auto-forward mobile users to the mobile site. Additionally, make sure to include links to “mobile site” and “full site” to allow users to switch.
• Touch-screen phones perform better.

NYPL Mobile

Congrats to NYPL for the beta release of a fantastic NYPL mobile website!

They call it a “very rough beta” but I didn’t see anything rough about it. Not only does it do a great job in providing key information (browse events, contact information, library locations, hours, & directions) in an easily navigable way but it also has a mobile-friendly way to begin a search of the collections (they’re still working on making all of their catalogs mobile-friendly). I particularly like that they managed to include branding and style that is consistent with the rest of their web presence… just because something is scaled down doesn’t mean it can’t have style.

See the NYPL Labs blog post by Michael Lascarides for more information about the interface and some of the work that went into it.

DCPL iPhone app

I’m also late in congratulating the DCPL on their cool Catalog iPhone application. You can read more about it at Aaron Schmidt’s walking paper blog and the DCPL Labs iphone page.

See also my flickr collection of mobile library interfaces.

The latest Horizon Report has just been released.

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium (NMC)’s Horizon Project, a long-running qualitative research project 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.

I always enjoy reading these reports but I found this one especially in sync with my current interest and work concerning mobile technologies. The report lists mobile technology as one of the technologies that will become much more integrated into learning environments within the next year. It’s not new news that mobile devices are ubiquitous on campus and beyond, but with the recent improvements in the technology (faster networks, GPS, integration of more multi-functionality), we will likely seen more and more mobile-friendly websites and services specifically designed for mobile users.

About the project | CommentPress version | PDF

Tutorial blog put together a nice list of tutorials, graphics, and code to help with developing for the iPhone.

http://tutorialblog.org/designing-for-the-iphone-resources/

I’d also add 2 nice omnigraffle stencils: Ultimate iPhone Stencil and Mobile – iPhone.

I’m in the middle of reading Cameron Moll’s Mobile Web Design book and the first couple of chapters do a fantastic job of putting mobile use in context. One of the citations lead me to Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users (Jan 2008). Here are some highlights from that blog post (though I highly recommend reading all of it):

“Real Networks reported in 2007 that 25% of all mobile phone users around the world access the internet on their phones. That is a staggering 825 million people already.”

“63% of all people who access the internet do so from their phones at least part of the time”

“…projected that to be 2.4 billion active users of SMS texting at the end of 2007″ “So one in three people on the planet already uses SMS text messaging.” compared to “800 million active users of email”

And then there’s this little nugget from Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Best Application UIs of 2008:

“Although dedicated mobile apps are not yet good enough to win in their own right, it was striking how many of this year’s winners have a mobile component. Mobile is definitively the trend to watch for next year, and any application owner should think hard about whether and how to add mobile features in 2009.”

Continuing my recent mobile trend I thought I’d look at some library catalogs that offer mobile interfaces. here’s a collection of screen shots of a few library catalogs that offer mobile interfaces (as seen on the iphone).

Click the images below or just go to my flickr Library Catalog Mobile Interfaces set

University of Virginia Libraries

VIRGO Catalog

UVa uses the Usablenet Transcoder service. The service is a “server-based tool that generates a customizable “text-only” view of your content, instantly…[to] display your current content in the best possible textual format to be accessed by disabled visitors and PDAs and cell phones users.” Unfortunately, I don’t think that mobile needs and accessibility needs are identical. Every page contains full site navigation which requires the mobile user to scroll down 2-3 screen lengths every time a new page loads before they can get to the content. Also problematic is that the search results page doesn’t include the item title (!) and the item record view is unnecessarily cluttered with tons of information. The transcoder site says it’s customizable so maybe with some more effort this could be a viable technique.

University of Richmond Libraries

UR LibMobile: Catalog

Richmond also uses a service that creates the mobile interface: Google mobile optimizer but this one works much better than Usablenet transcoder. I appreciate that the buttons and fields are big enough to easily click without zooming. The search results gives all the most important bits of information including availability and location. The main negative is that it unnecessarily retains a lot of the extra functionality of the regular catalog (like refining searches, saving to bookbag, etc) that makes scanning more difficult. These features might be nice to have via a mobile device, but they are definitely nonessential and would need to be redesigned and incorporated into the mobile environment.

Ball State

www.bsu.edu/libraries/MOPAC

The search page is good because it just offers a few basic search options. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working very well because I tried many searches (usability, web, science, engineering) and none of them produced any results. Finally, a search for keyword=english produced many results. Unfortunately (again), there is no search results list and you have to scroll through each item one by one. Even if the search was performing correctly, you’d be lucky if the item you wanted was in the first 10 results!

Nashville Public Library

waldo.library.nashville.org/airpac/jsp/airpacIndex.jsp

Nashville Public Library uses airpac (from Innovative Interfaces). This seems to be a popular option because I found that quite a few other libraries use it as well.

The search interface is nice and simple. The search results page is almost too simple and only gives very limited information (title & year). Overall, not too many complaints for this one… it’s just a little lackluster.

NCSU Libraries

www.lib.ncsu.edu/m/

MobiLIB is NCSU’s home grown mobile application and is (not too surprisingly) the best of the bunch. It’s obvious that they’ve put a good deal of thought and time into their product. The search is simple and I especially appreciate the option to restrict to items currently available because if you’re standing in the stacks looking something up on your phone, your likely to only want things currently available! The search results page is also very nice in that the items are formatted to aid reading and scanning and it gives the most important information (title, location, availability, and call number). Unlike the other interfaces, the only time I had to zoom in to read the text was on the item record page because of the item’s long title.

I’ve been taking photos of objects in the library for years now… so when I saw Walking Paper’s lovely library-ish iphone wallpaper post – I was inspired to make group of my own.

Most of these were taken in the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library, Preservation and Conservation lab, and the Art, Architecture, and Engineering Library.

All have been formatted specifically for the iphone (320×480) but they’ll probably work for other mobile devices too. Click to get full version.

Besides actual mobile versions of websites, there are also ways to improve interaction through mobile-friendly features. One way is to allow users to text or email a book’s information from the library catalog to their mobile phone. Not only does this create a better user experience, it also cuts down on unnecessary printing of catalog record pages.

Georgia Tech Library (vufind)

Tri College Libraries

Morris Library at Southern Illinois University

Ryerson University

WorldCat.org

Plymouth State University Library Catalog (Scriblio)

See also – my flickr set of Library OPACs & Mobile-Friendly Features