Mobilizing the library and its friends

I've changed ever so slightly the name of this blog.

It used to be "Superpatron - Friends of the Library for the net". 
Now it's "Superpatron - Mobilizing the Friends of the Library".

This reflects two sets of relevant current focus which I hope to turn into more frequent posts: one around "mobile libraries" in the sense of access to library services provided by mobile phones, and the second around "mobilizing library patrons" to bring them to effective action as needed to bring to bear support for or change in the library services in their communities.  There's a third piece of that too re mobility in the sense of access to transportation to library services and access by patrons who have mobility challenges or who are relying on public transportation.

The scenario I have in mind runs as follows - anywhere you see a computer in here you should assume that it's on a mobile device, not a desktop or a laptop.

I hear about a book I want to read; I reserve it at the library, and I plan a bus trip to the library to pick it up.  Two minutes before the bus arrives I show up at the bus stop, hop on the bus, sit down and read a poem along the way. When I get off the bus, I walk to the library, pick up the book, read it, find a few more that I want to read that are related, and walk to the stacks to pull them.   When I'm done I scribble a few notes and transcribe a few quotes to be added to my next presentation.  And then I'm off to the next meeting.

Related to themes of the past (my "library mashups" work that got a lot of interest) I think that more of what I'm going to be working on for code is going to run on a server somewhere, since I have pretty pessimistic assumptions about my ability to write code for all of the mobile phones out there.    The transportation part is not really a library issue per se, but there are a lot of people who use the bus to get to the library, and there's some unique opportunity to put transit information into library on-site displays to help that out.   And there's a whole slew of "ebooks" ferment underway, ranging from special purpose handheld bookstores like the Kindle to plain text short format fiction that actually work pretty well on ordinary mobile phone web browsers.

The "mobilizing" word is deliberate as well.  At various times I describe myself as a "community organizer" (now that it's clear what that career path looks like) and part of that role is mobilizing support and bringing people to action to support their cause.

I have a couple of talks lined up for 2009 - one non-trivial goal is to have the slides that I make have relevance to what would otherwise be a non-overlapping or barely overlapping set of programmers, library directors, community leaders and transportation people.   As dates are confirmed I'll share them here. 

thanks!

Ed