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Want the Library Everywhere? There’s an App for That

6 Comments

There are iPhone apps for just about anything.  They’ve got you covered if you need to get Danish handball scores, calculate alimony, keep track of your pet’s vet records, or create and test palindromes.  There is more than just fun in the world of apps, though.  Here are some great research tools for mobile devices.

At Duke, there are a number of great ways to work in the library wherever you are.  You can use the library’s mobile website to find library hours, available computers, directions, contact info and more.  If you’re doing medical research, take a look at Duke’s Medical Center Library mobile site.  It’s full of features enabling you to do PICO analysis, browse e-journals, and link to many helpful mobile resources.

On the Digital Collections blog, it was recently announced that you can search, browse and view our Digital Collections on your mobile device.  Be sure to watch the short video demonstrating the ease of this feature in their post announcing this new tool.  Just announced this week, you can now watch vintage ads from Duke Libraries Hartman Center from Duke iTunes U.

There are other nice mobile tools outside of Duke as well.  This is just a partial list and some of these are third-party apps, but this will give you an idea of the possibilities out there.  Some useful apps include those for WorldCat.org, the arXiv pre-print server for physics, math, computer science, etc, or the Papers PDF organizer software in mobile form.

I’m sure I’ve missed some helpful mobile resources.  What others are out there?

6 thoughts on “Want the Library Everywhere? There’s an App for That”

  1. When are we going to see a mobile/iPhone version of the library’s catalog? Whether a web app or an outright iTunes store app, THAT would be useful. You’re browsing the stacks, and you remember that you need to pick up Book X, but have no idea where it would be.

    Right now, it’s kind of clunky to navigate through the library catalog on mobile Safari.

  2. I concur with the above comment. You have to zoom in so far! Bad for the eyesight, you see.

  3. +1

    I was all excited for a moment when I saw the above link to the library’s mobile site, but it’s missing the main way I want to interact with the library online: the catalog. Catalog searching would be a fantastic addition to both the mobile site for anyone with a tiny browser, and the DukeMobile app for us Apple drones.

  4. Thanks for your comments. We think this would be a great app too. We’ve been looking into it and hopefully we’ll know more about this possibility in the near future.

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