Mobile Computing
By - Saturday, November 13, 2010 - 3:40am
Last Friday I spent the day at Morrison and Foerster's San Diego offices attending the San Diego Association of Law Libraries (SANDALL) Fall Workshop. The workshop topic was "Staying Connected: Mobile Apps for Law Librarians." The day's presentations included one by librarians at San Diego State University who are using QR codes to facilitiate mobile web content and another by representatives of the Balboa Park Online Collaborative, which recently released an iPhone app.
SANDALL Vice President Jane Larrington was asked me to be the workshop's keynote speaker, and I gave two talks over the course of the day. The first, "Mobile Is Here... Whether You Want It or Not," discussed all the ways our libraries have become mobile presences regardless of whether librarians did anything to make things mobile-friendly. Because our patrons use mobile technology, and because sites like Foursquare and Facebook provide mobile web presences for our libraries, we became mobile libraries anyway.
Mobile Is Here... Whether You Want It or Not
View more presentations from Tom Boone.
And to those who are aware of my hatred of QR codes, yes, I did discuss them in a favorable light in this presentation. There are excellent uses for them. The problem is, too many libraries use them for non-mobile applications or fail to properly label the codes, giving users no indication of what purpose a code serves before they scan it. In the proper, limited applications (like the Project Gutenberg example in my slides), QR codes can work. But I reserve the right to trash them when they don't.
The second talk, titled "Making Mobile Work for Your Library," was a gentle introduction to mobile app development, discussing technical issues related to cellular data networks, mobile features available to app developers and the requirements of developing native and web apps for mobile phones.
Making Mobile Work in Your Library
View more presentations from Tom Boone.
SANDALL plans to post videos of the workshop at a later date.
By - Friday, February 12, 2010 - 7:27am
I love my iPhone, but its core functionality doesn't always provide the tools necessary for me to function as a mobile librarian. Faculty requests for articles are an almost daily occurrence for me, and I'm not always in my office when I get them. Yesterday, for example, I was in a lunch presentation when I got an email from a colleague with an urgent request. I didn't have my laptop with me, so I used my iPhone to track down the article. JSTOR had the document I needed, but when I displayed the PDF file in Mobile Safari, there wasn't much I could do with it except read it. I certainly couldn't save a copy or attach it to an email:
So even though I'd found the requested article, I couldn't send it to the person who needed it it until I got back to my office an hour later.
I knew there had to be a way to get a PDF out of my browser and into an email. Josh Brauer tipped me off to an app called GoodReader. It's not free, but at 99 cents it's hardly expensive. GoodReader is a PDF/TXT reader and file storage application, and because it has its own web browser one can access PDFs on the web and save them.
Once the file downloads, it resides in the app's file library. From there, select it and choose the email option, which drops the file into a new email as a file attachment.
There's also a method for saving documents to GoodReader directly from within Mobile Safari, but I find it easier to use the app's browser since I'll have to switch to GoodReader to email the file anyway.
I've only described a small fraction of GoodReader's functionality here, but this document delivery feature alone makes it worth 99 cents. There's also a free version of the application that limits storage to only five documents.
