Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

Reference on your iPhone?  Besides providing a way for iPhone and iTouch users to find their way around the Duke University campus, review the course catalog, and search for events, DukeMobile now offers 32,000 images from Duke’s Digital Library Collection. Duke is the first institution to offer access to images and materials in this way, but several reference publishers have already gotten on the iPhone badwagon.  Subscribers to the online version of Berkshire Publishing’s new Encyclopedia of China can download an Exact Editions Exactly APP from iTunes in order to access the encyclopedia on an iPhone. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Britannica Mobile iPhone Edition has been available for over a year.

I can’t imagine reading an encyclopedia article on an iPhone (maybe because I don’t have one) but reading seems to be beside the point. Whatever this means in the long run, it’s another reason for people not to come to the library, and for librarians and reference publishers to continue to rethink the way we do things.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 2:13 pm and is filed under In the News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.