Citation
Calvert, P. (2013), "Building Mobile Library Applications", The Electronic Library, Vol. 31 No. 4, pp. 536-537. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-04-2013-0055
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
This book is on mobile application design and development; that is, it provides practical methods for building software, web apps, or websites for mobile and handheld devices. Directed at all developers from beginners to experts, the book is a guide through the process of planning, developing, and launching mobile library applications.
The reader willing to apply what is offered by the book will learn how to build mobile applications that use library data or work in library contexts. The author describes projects ranging from simple to complex, in step‐by‐step tutorials; fortunately most exercises require only freely available software or web applications plus a text editor and a web browser.
Following the template of books in The Tech Set series, the book starts with thoughts about planning issues. Later on there are chapters on marketing, including some interesting thoughts about using search engine optimisation as a means for improving “findability”, and a brief chapter on metrics.
The main content of the book gives the reader ideas and practical examples of crating mobile solutions to library problems. This is done through a description of projects, for example: making a first simple mobile website (using Winksite), building an iPhone app ready to be submitted to the iPhone app store; and using the WorldCat Search API and HTML5 JavaScript geolocation API to build a search that provides views of your library catalogue data based on WorldCat holdings, and optimising mobile sites with CSS. Each of the projects is described clearly (though some will baulk at the terminology), and the text is supported by many screenshots and occasionally the provision of source code (which can be downloaded from the accompanying website).
The book undoubtedly has a place on the shelves of library school collections. Any information workers who fancy themselves as working on the leading edge must surely be able to create mobile applications and so should have access to a copy.