Positioning Your Library in the Mobile Ecosystem

The title of this post is also the title of a presentation given by Joe Murphy at a small professional development event hosted by LYRASIS in Philadelphia Last Week. Joe is a Librarian/Innovator who works  at Yale University. He has made it his mission to keep up with the latest technology news, and to think about how these new technologies may impact the future of librarianship. His presentation can be found on his webpage http://joemurphylibraryfuture.com/ . According to Joe, the presentation “explore[ed] the current ecosystem of mobile information….[its] Focus [was] to learn how we can position and redesign the delivery of and interaction with content within the life flow of contemporary mobile consumers.”  Personally I also found the presentation engaging and useful because it introduced me to several mobile applications and online tools that have been very excited to try this past week, tools, such as this online music application  and a forthcoming book recommendation application that I will likely soon be unable to live without. His website also contains his blog where he reports on the latest technology news. This blog may be a useful link to  add to your daily professional development reading, especially if you are having trouble keeping up with all the latest technology news out there. Let Joe do it for you!

However, while Joe’s presentation offered many neat tools and much information about the mobile environment, perhaps more useful for putting these mobile applications and trends into context for the library world  is a story he referenced from a recent issue of Next Space, the OCLC newsletter. This article called Innovation Gaps: What’s keeping you from inventing the future focuses on identifying barriers to innovation (such as complacency, resources, bureaucracy) and then discussing how librarians can overcome these barriers to remain relevant in the future.