David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Five Ways to Up your Library’s Mobile Game – new article

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I have another new(ish) article in the April 2022 Computers in Libraries magazine. It’s focused on easy ways to make your customer’s mobile experience a better one.

Here are my five points in the article:

  1. Make sure your website works on mobile
  2. Have a mobile apps page on your website
  3. Create a comfortable in-building mobile experience
  4. FInd fun ways to connect
  5. Train staff on mobile devices and apps

As usual, click over to the article to read it! Also, if you want a more in-depth look at mobile technology, find a copy of my ALA Library Technology Report, not-so-surprisingly titled Mobile Technology in Libraries.

Enjoy!

Mobile Technology in Libraries – new Publications!

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Mobile Technology in Libraries

Recently, I had two things published:

  1. Wired for Wireless: Five ways to make your library more mobile-friendly – article in American Libraries magazine
  2. Mobile Technology in Libraries – a new Library Technology Report from ALA Techsource.

Here’s the blurb for my Library Technology Report:

“Most of your library customers own a smartphone, using it for a variety of tasks. They want to use their smartphones in and around the library. This issue of Library Technology Reports (vol. 57, no. 2), “Mobile Technology in Libraries,” presents tools and practices for giving your customers a great experience while connecting with your library. It addresses provisions supporting customers’ mobile use inside the library, such as Wi-Fi and charging stations, or outside the building, offering mobile access for basic library tasks. The report will show ways in which libraries are using mobile technology to address the digital divide, such as circulating hot spots or training, and how staff can use mobile technology to expand services in the community.”

Hope you find them useful!

Mobile Technology and Home Broadband use – new Pew Research Center Report

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https://www.pewinternet.org/2019/06/13/mobile-technology-and-home-broadband-2019/

The Pew Research Center just released their newest report on mobile technology and Home Broadband use. Check it out – there’s some really interesting stuff in the report, as always.

Here are some highlights:

  • 81% of US adults own a smartphone.
  • 73% of US adults have home broadband.
  • 37% of US adults mostly use a smartphone when going online. Wow.
    • 58% of 18-29 year olds do that…
    • 47% of adults age 30-49 do it. This is growing.
  • 45% of non-broadband users say they don’t have broadband at home because their smartphone does everything they need.

Another interesting tidbit: smartphone ownership doesn’t vary much across economic, racial, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. But home broadband use does.

  • 17% of US adults are smartphone-only internet users. They don’t have broadband at home. It was 20% in 2018, so it has varied somewhat in a year’s time.

The report also said this: “Roughly four-in-ten non-adopters report having other options for internet access outside of their home” … “other options” hey, that’s us!

What should we take away from this?

  • Our web services need to work well on mobile devices
  • We need to have a mobile-first mentality when creating web content. Make sure everything we do online looks good on mobile devices.
  • 4 in 10 people without broadband at home depend on places like libraries to supply their broadband needs. This means we need the best wifi in town! And also adequate, comfy charging station areas in our libraries.

What else? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Mobile App Saves the Day

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smartphone in actionI don’t always realize how odd the times we live in are, in terms of technology (yes, the times we live in are generally pretty weird – yay politics!). But in terms of tech – it’s changing pretty darn fast.

For example …

My youngest daughter is in college, and needed to type in pages of text from a book for a project she’s working on. My wife was helping her with this, and had a thought … so she asked me “do you think there’s some sort of app that will let you take a picture of this page and turn it into text, so we don’t have to type so much?”

Good question! That translated in my techie head to “look for an OCR app,” which I did, and which I found (look for the OCR Scanner in Apple’s App store). It worked great, and just like my wife described – take a picture of the text, push the magical “OCR” button … and we had text. Sweet!

It worked remarkably well. The app apparently didn’t like the letter J, but otherwise it did a great job of turning an image of text into actual text.

Which made me realize just how far we have come! I was an academic librarian early in my career, and we talked about doing OCR scanning of rare books. The scanners were (maybe still are) pretty expensive. It wasn’t always very accurate and definitely required some serious clean-up work.

But this? I already have a phone. The app? Free. Sure, the app could have been better – there wart a slightly wonky process of doing the scan, then copying/pasting the text into an email (there didn’t seem to be a “save” feature in the app). I wouldn’t want to repeat that for a whole book of scanning! But that’s just the first free app I found. I’ll guess there are others that might work better.

Just a realization that if you need something:

  1. Yes, there probably is an app for that.
  2. How weird that I can even say that!
  3. What once was time-consuming, pricey, and took multiple people to do … now fits in my pocket.
  4. It might even be free.

Using iPads in the Library Building

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iPads in the art galleryBefore I head off to #alaac18, I thought I’d share what my library is doing with iPads.

Right now, we are using iPads in the building in three different ways:

  1. Musical iPads in the art gallery! This summer, we have a music-themed exhibit in the library’s art gallery. There are “exploded instruments,” showing how they are built. There are also a couple of hands-on things, like a PVC pipe xylophone that you can play. You can also walk up to three iPads (check out the photo in this post to see them in action) and play an organ, a synthesizer, and a drumset!
  2. iPad catalog station. We need more library catalog computers in our Kids Library. Instead of adding a computer (and a table, and power, and drilling for a network jack), we added an iPad with the library catalog on a web browser. Kids (and parents) are actually using it. It’s on a stand like the iPads in the art gallery.
  3. Team Room reservations. We have eight group study rooms (we call them Team Rooms) that you can reserve for up to 7 days in advance. You can do it on our website, or you can walk up to an empty room and make the reservation on the iPad in front of the room (using software that we built).

That’s what we are doing! Actually using iPads isn’t necessary – we could do the same thing with Android tablets. Either way, they are pretty handy additions to our building – reservations, easy-to-add library catalog access, and an interactive experience in an art gallery.

How are you using iPads in your library? Please share!