Mobile Libraries

If you don't mind (and since I have very few readers, I don't think that you will) I am going to veer away from my usual book reviews for a moment.

A week or so ago, I needed to go to the library to gather some research materials. Normally I would use my teaching privileges to have the library pull the books for me and hold them at the desk, but they had postponed that service for the winter holidays. Thus, I used the library catalog to create a list of items that I wanted and then prepared to go to the library to do the work myself. I was going to print this list, but could not find a way to do this without printing summaries, images, and such that would equal about 20 pages. Because that was not very cost efficient or environmentally friendly, I really did not want to do this. No worries, though. I have a fancy new iPhone that will allow me to access this list on the go... so I saved these items to my e-shelf for future access and waltzed off to the library thinking that I would look at the list from my cell phone and pull the books off the shelf based upon that list. Sounds like a simple plan, right? Wrong.

I arrived at the library as planned. I accessed my e-shelf as planned. I even saw the list of books as planned. But, what I didn't notice before I planned this expedition was that the list did not include call numbers and you could only see the details of one book at a time, which took a long time to download on a mobile device. I thought to myself, "This is ridiculous. There has to be an easier way." So I promptly walked down to the 2nd floor and visited the reference librarian. Fortunately, since the university was not in session, I didn't have to wait in line to visit her. And I asked: "IS there a better way to do this?"

"Of course there is," she said. "There has to be."

So we sat down together and looked at the list of books I had gathered on my account, trying to find a way to view the list online, with call numbers, which seemed to be the only piece of information that any list didn't include. After about 20 minutes of sitting at that desk with no success, we both admitted (temporary) defeat. I needed to find my books before it got too dark to walk home, so we just decided to call it quits. I ended up just jotting down the call numbers of the books on a scrap piece of paper and using that to track down my books.

A few days later, I received an email from a reference staff member. The reference librarian that I had spoken to (and I wish I could remember her name so that I could give her credit) had not stopped working on my problem after I left. She had continued searching for a method of printing a list of call numbers long after I had left the building. I don't know if it was just a slow night or if she really cared that much but I do give her a big kudos for continuing to try to solve the problem even when the patron in question would probably not be back to find out the results.

Anyway... I received an email from the reference desk that provided me some detailed instructions for creating a list with call numbers. It was a 10-step process that would ultimately send the results list to my email. However, my big problem with that is that I saved all of my searches on the new "catalog" screen that the library has adopted. Technically, Primo is not a catalog, but is just a shiny new user interface that looks like it actually came from this century. I was using this catalog when I found my results and, thus, any results that I found were saved on my e-shelf there... which apparently is not the same as the e-shelf on the "classic catalog"... the only place where you can save a simple list with title, author, and call number.

Now, I know that all catalogs are different and all libraries are different, but I still think there has to be a better way to do this. The world we live in is becoming increasingly dependent on mobile devices and we libraries should adapt our technologies to fit the needs of the community at large. And instead of the responsibility of this being placed on individual libraries, maybe we could create a consortium (of sorts) that would allow us to pool our catalog records (oh, wait, we all ready have one of those!) into one program that would work on a mobile device. We could create an app that would allow you to specify your location and search the available materials at that location. You could star your selections and it would automatically tell you the title, author and location of that book in the collection. We could even make it so that our app could sync with our personal library accounts on the web so that we could load the information from our computers and have it automatically appear on our phones and vise versa. Wouldn't that be grand?

I don't know. I am not a web designer by any stretch of the imagination, but it feels like this template is already out there in some form or another, so somebody should be able to adapt it for libraries.

Or is there something like this already out there? Food for thought.