Friday 13 April 2012

Things from LILIC12

I didn't get to go to LILIC12 but I did follow some of the sessions using Twitter. It was a good thing really because there were a number of interesting mobile / tablet related sessions that inspired me.

Firstly was the Roving Librarian piece from Alison Sharman at the University of Huddersfield. With it''s HE focus I did find some of what she talked about depressing - having the luxury of subject librarians for starters. That said, with our ipads due to arrive any day, it was useful to hear from someone who has already started integrating them into a service. Certainly it opened my eyes to taking our 'roving enquiry service' out of the libraries and into the wider college.

The Roving Librarian: Keep Taking the Tablets - http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/13312/
The next link is quite old in terms of looking at mobile technology in libraries (2010) and focuses more on the services available than the technology. Although we are a long way off developing our own mobile sites or apps at college it is interesting to see what students are using the mobile web for. However with smartphones becoming more and more sophisticated I can't help but wonder if, should this study be repeated now, we would find students using them in a more interactive way than the passive functions, such as checking opening ours and location, found to be most popular in 2010.  

Universities and Libraries Move to the Mobile Web-
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/UniversitiesandLibrariesMoveto/206531

Lastly, there was a lot of talk on Twitter about Layars, a open source service that allows developers to integrate augmented reality into real world objects. I was going to download it from the app store and have a play but I can't seem to find it so I'm going to try again another time. I think it's similar to QR codes in that it adds online content to items or print - just much more sophisticated and unobstrusive.

 Augmented Reality experiences on your mobile phone -http://www.layar.com/


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