Presentation given as part of the introduction to a workshop hosted by JISC collections to discuss how to address some of the issues libraries are experiencing with the mobile apps and websites offered by publishers.
2. Challenges
The challenge for MACON was to
address the difficulties involved in
delivering quality academic
content to mobile devices in a
seamless and user-friendly manner
through a resource discovery
interface.
The purpose of the project was to
explore the possibilities and share
the findings with the M-Libraries
community.
The content available to our users
includes a wide selection of third
party material & local collections
such as the Open Research
Repository (ORO) and OU audio-
visual materials.
3. Mobile discovery
Users are prompted to log in as soon
as they select “Search from the
homepage. That way they only have
to sign in once per session to access
full text content.
Users asked for advanced search
option.
11. Thank you for listening
Project blog & toolkit: http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/macon
#mlibs
Keren Mills
Project Manager
keren.mills@open.ac.uk
@mirya
Editor's Notes
All our students are off campus, so device pairing and IP authentication are no good to us.
The challenge for MACON was to address the difficulties involved in delivering quality academic content to mobile devices in a seamless and user-friendly manner through a resource discovery interface. The purpose of the project was to explore the possibilities and share the findings with the M-Libraries community. The content available to our users includes a wide selection of third party material & local collections such as the Open Research Repository (ORO) and OU audio-visual materials.Many publishers were developing apps, Many were only for iOSAll sorts of authentication issuesapps are likely to interupt student workflow.
The EDS API enabled us to integrate the search results into the OU Library mobile website which provides efficient response for search results and avoids the confusion students can experience when they start a search on the library website and are presented with results in a different interface. We have aimed to provide a simpler (but effective) search experience for our mobile users and they can expand search results fields should they wish to see full abstract (the dynamic expand function to view abstracts has been implemented using JQuery)Our users do want some advanced functionality on mobile discovery tools, such as the ability to toggle between only showing search results where the full text is available and showing all results. We prompt users to log in as soon as they select ‘Search’ from the homepage.
Due to early sign-in no authentication required to get article.
Talk about Diary study, Focus Group and Learning at Work Day.
Some licence agreements with content providers or publishers prohibit storing user log-in credentials on their personal devices.
Be aware of all licence agreements – some prohibit reformatting of content or local storage of credentialsAuthentication is rife with complications
Gradual growth in use of mobile websiteNot advertised or promoted much – no helpdesk support until 2012