Mobile Technology and Academic Libraries: Innovative Services for Research and Learning

Mobile Technology and Academic Libraries: Innovative Services for Research and Learning, edited by Robin Canuel and Chad Crichton. ACRL, 2017. 978-0-8389-8879-4.

Publisher's Description

Mobile technology has become a ubiquitous presence in the lives of today’s students and faculty. The maturing of this technology has led to our becoming more and more comfortable in a world where digital information flows seamlessly from screen to screen as we move about our daily lives. This evolution presents both risks and opportunities for academic librarians, operating in a field that is both uniquely tied to a static sense of “place” in the public imagination and at the same time passionately devoted to the freedom, spread, and accessibility of information for the public at large.

In seventeen chapters ranging from A Mobile-First Library Site Redesign to Mobile Technology Support for Field Research to Virtual Reality Library Environments, Mobile Technology and Academic Libraries explores how librarians around the world are working to adapt their spaces, collections, teaching, and services to the new possibilities presented by mobile technology. This is a detailed and thorough examination of technology that’s emerging now and how to incorporate it into your library to help the students and researchers of both today and tomorrow.

Leveraging the potential of smartphones, tablets, and even wearable technologies allows academic librarians to further expand their reach to students and faculty beyond the library’s walls. Furthermore, by understanding how mobile technology changes the behavior of our users, we can gain new insights into their needs and make improvements to our traditional services and spaces to better contribute to faculty research and student learning.

More Information
See the publisher's website for Table of Contents and information about the editors.

Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians

Koerber, Jennifer and Michael P. Sauers. Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-4422-38886.

From the publisher:

Here’s a one-stop snapshot of emerging technologies every librarian should know about and examples that illustrate how the technologies are being used in libraries today! The e-book includes videos of interviews with librarians that are using them. The videos are available on a web site for people who purchase the print book.

The first four chapters—Audio & Video, Self- and Micro-Publishing, Mobile Technology, and Crowdfunding—all look at older technologies reinvented and reimagined through significant advances in quality, scale, or hardware. Many libraries were already using these technologies in some way, and are now able to change and adapt those uses to meet current needs and take advantage of the latest improvements.

The two next chapters look at new technologies: wearable technologies and the Internet of Things (simple but powerful computers that can be embedded into everyday objects and connected to controllers or data aggregation tools). The last two chapters—Privacy & Security and Keeping Up With Technology—are all-purpose topics that will continue to be affected by new developments in technology.

Each of these chapters offers a brief overview of background information and current events, followed by a list of advantages and challenges to using these technologies in a library setting. The authors highlight the most useful or most well-known tools and devices, then specify how these technologies might be used in a library setting. Finally, they look at a variety of current examples from libraries in the United States and around the globe.