If you are like the millions of people buying the latest smartphone, iPhone 5, or Samsung Galaxy S III, your local library should have something to offer you. The Emma S. Clark Memorial Library, for one, has an app for that! Dubbed "Emma Mobile," the library's application works with iOS (Apple), Android (Google), and Amazon Kindle Fire…

This article covers the basic principles of responsive web design for those interested in creating their own responsive sites from scratch, as well as noting a few frameworks that can be used to speed up development time. The author favors the Foundation CSS framework for responsive development because of its syntax, diverse selection of…

The overwhelming results were iPhones and Android devices. Since the library wasn't equipped technologically to develop an in-house application platform and because we wanted the content to work across all mobile platforms, we decided to focus on creating a mobile web-based platform. From the NLM page of mobile sites we chose the basic PubMed/…

With the advent of mobile phones--and smartphones in particular--people are slowly moving away from the notion that mobile phones are just for making calls and texting. This coupled with the fact that the uptake of mobile phones hit the 5 billion mark in 2010 has spurred many libraries to offer services that can be used by their patrons on these…

The author, a digital access architect in the information systems department of the Orange County Library System in Florida, was given the challenge of creating a library mobile app around the 2009 holiday season. At that time, Sheri Chambers, digital content manager in the information systems department, and Debbie Moss, assistant director of the…

The 2009 "Horizon Report" called mobile technologies "an opportunity for higher education to reach its constituents in new and compelling ways." The report implied that academic libraries would find them to be the ideal tools for bringing reluctant researchers to the library, mainly for their convenience. It's not hard to see why--in 2008, mobile…

In the summer of 2010, Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam started offering the world's first library in an airport. This article describes Airport Library which is no ordinary library. It holds more than 1,200 items, but it lends nothing. It operates 24/7, yet it's only staffed by volunteers for 2 or 3 hours a day. It offers just nine public-access…

For many Digital Natives, text messaging or SMS is the communication channel of choice, but preferences in communication channels aren't the only distinguishing traits of Digital Natives. Attitudes and perceptions related to digital privacy, identity, creativity, piracy, and advocacy also help to set younger generations apart. So how does one take…

Since the turn of the century, one of the hottest topics in the IT world has been the coming mobile revolution. While there's been some arguing over the details, the fundamental tenet of the mobile revolution is that lots and lots of people will start accessing web content from handheld portable devices instead of using a traditional laptop or…