Confessions of a technophile

The National Library Board of Singapore has started a mobile website where users can search the library catalog, check their library accounts, find out about events and even download free e-books.

While the mobile site (http://mtest.nlb.gov.sg) is currently in beta, I've been impressed with its simplicity and ease of use. More importantly, this is a step forward in putting library services at the fingertips of users on the move. Note that you can only access the site on a mobile phone browser.

My favorite feature has got to be the catalog search. I still remember the days when I had to write down call numbers on paper after searching for books on the library website at home or in the library before I hit the bookshelves.

On NLB's mobile site, you can perform a catalog search like you would on the full library website, and have the details of a title sent to your cellphone as a text message. It makes a lot of sense - we all carry cellphones with us wherever we go, at least here in Singapore, so why do we still end up with call numbers written on slips of paper while we are in the library?

Besides putting the catalog in your pocket, you can reserve a title, check its availability and choose a library branch to pick up the item, just like what you would do on a full-fledged site. You can also check out the latest arrivals, read the posts from NLB blogs, and download short novels in the form of e-books written by local authors such as Ho Minfong and Wahab Hj Hamzah.


It's interesting to see a library experimenting with e-books on a cellphone which can be potentially challenging. The diverse range of handsets can present compatibility issues with Mobipocket Reader, the mobile reader software that NLB has chosen for its e-books. I'm sure these issues were taken into account, since PDF versions of the same e-books are also available to cater to users with mobile PDF readers.

In the long run, my guess is that reading e-books on a mobile phone will continue to be a novelty. The small screen sizes and celllphone user behavior (short bursts of usage, in-transit), do not lend themselves to reading full-length novels. The only place where e-books have worked on a cellphones is Japan, where a genre of writing called the keitai shosetsu, written with truncated text and often with little plot or character development, has become part of Japanese popular culture. While controversial from a literary point of view, these mobile novels, some of which have been republished in book form, continue to appeal to Japanese youths.

Outside Japan, the declining cost of data plans and improvements in cellphone user interface designs will be key drivers in attracting more users to the mobile Web in years to come. In fact, telcos that are carrying the Apple iPhone are already reporting higher data revenues from iPhone users.

Just as libraries today are now expected to have a website on the WWW, they will have to establish a presence on the mobile Web. Particularly in developing countries such as India, where wired infrastructure is still limited in reach, the cellphone is proving to be the only way for people to access the Internet.

If you're interested in finding out more about what libraries can do with mobile technologies, check out ALA's fifth Library Technology Report written by Ellyssa Kroski, an independent information consultant. She recently presented at the NEASIS&T Mobile Mania event in Boston. Her slides below provide a good overview of things that libraries need to think about when going mobile: