More mobile technologies: the iPodtouch

Our far sighted Reader Services Librarian has bought an iPodtouch so that we can all be trained to understand the issues involved in communicating with readers using phone and touch operating systems. Touch screen interfaces are very popular and more and more computers (notepads and ipads) are using this type of operating system so it is important to keep up with our users (or preferably one step ahead of them.)When you turn the ipod on you see a display of icons. If you swipe your finger across the page from right to left the page moves across with it to reveal a second page of icons. Each icon represents a gadget that has been downloaded, and as the ads tell us, there are thousands of apps to choose from. I accidentally tripped onto one already loaded on to our ipod which listed British birds and played you their songs if you clicked on their picture. How could I shut it down? I had to rush off to find the person the Reader Services Librarian trained yesterday (trickle down learning effect.) This kind soul showed me that if you click the button in the middle of the ipod you get instantly taken back to the menu icons screen. She showed me that the Safari icon was the Internet interface (I was not expecting Safari: it was all so confusing ;-) What fun though! Soon our library wireless login screen appeared. help! The writing was very very tiny! My colleague gently explained how to tap on the input boxes on the web pages to make a keyboard pop up on the screen. Then she showed me how to make the screen wider or smaller using hand gestures that are sort of the opposite of a pinch. (Yes I know they always do all these things on the adverts but being confronted with a real one wipes your brain clean.) I found the keyboard a bit difficult to use but nothing like as difficult as the first time I used a touchpad instead of a mouse, (technology that we use all the time these days without even thinking about it) so I guess I will get the hang of it. I was also most surprised when I happened to turn the thing on its side and the screen automatically remained upright and turned into a sort of landscape widescreen format. My colleague apparently uses this to download t.v. from BBC iplayer etc. although she says you would'nt want to use Word etc. on it as the screen would be too small for serious word processing.
I logged into our library homepage and looked up a book in the catalogue. So now users can wander around the library with the library catalogue on their phones looking for the book they want at the same time (cool!) And yes, as I said yesterday, it is every cataloguer's dream to be able to do this with the Cataloguing client (one day perhaps....) I was also shown how to use the 'app' Epocrates which helps you identify any pill. Another helps you do a simple search of Pubmed.
Since the younger generation are so emotionally attached to their phones and phone technology I think this is definitely the way computer operating systems will go in future and librarians need to ensure that their services can be viewed well in this way and evaluate whether they need to develop apps to enable users to access their services in new ways from mobile technology.