Screen shots of before and after to demonstrate differences In early 2011 we heard that our Library Development Grant for our Smartphone Library service had been successful. This idea had first formed when council’s Customer Services Manager brought a company called BlinkMobile to a managers’ meeting to demonstrate what they had done for Brisbane City. By reformatting key webpages to better suit the small screens of smart phones – iPhones and android based phones – the information had been made much more accessible and usable. This triggered some thinking about how we could use a services like this within the libraries, for the customer service manager, having the libraries hours and locations accessible in this way would reduce calls to council’s after hours call centres on weekends, when parents discover after the Saturday morning soccer game that a major assisgnment is due on Monday. Instead of calling they would just look it up on their 3G connected smartphone and off they’d go. But what if they could look up the library catalogue and see which branch they needed to go to and then download a map of how to get there? And what what if they could look up our online databases, find loads of full text articles from encyclopaedias, reference books and magazine articles and decide not to go to the library but to save some time by logging on when they get back home and do their research online.
But before I get ahead of myself – we had to think about why this service would be good for the City of Canada Bay community. We knew that Canada Bay had a higher than average number of internet connections per residence, so we were fairly sure our community were likely to be picking up on new technologies. We knew that some suburbs in the City of Canada Bay were relatively wealthy, and were noticing that smartphones were becoming more and more common. So when we became aware of the possibility of reformatting web pages and services into a smartphone compatible format we thought a smartphone library website had the potential to be very popular with our community.
The 2006 Census revealed that of Canada Bay's 24,414 dwellings, 70.6% had an internet connection, of these 76.6% were broadband compared to Metropolitan Sydney's 65.9% and 72.4% respectively, illustrating Canada Bay community's uptake of internet technologies is greater than Sydney's average. Therefore it is likely that the uptake of internet connected smartphones would be higher in this LGA. Although statistics on mobile phone internet connections were not yet available, we extrapolated Canada Bay's uptake of broadband and internet with the growing interest in mobile internet to conclude that residents would embrace this project enthusiastically. An article from Computer World magazine in August 2010 revealed that in 2009 over 4 million smartphones were shipped to Australia, and by 2015 62% of all mobile phones in Australia would be smartphones.
In mid 2010 council’s Customer Services manager asked a company who had developed a smartphone compatible website for Brisbane City to make a presentation to the council’s managers meeting. Given what we were seeing happen in the community and the high level of use of the library’s website and online resources it seemed like an ideal answer to making our online presence more easily used on the go. The customer services manager wanted a smartphone presence for a number of her services but also wanted the library involved because the most common calls to the relatively expensive after hours call service on weekends were asking about the library’s opening hours. But of course we didn’t have the budget to do it all so….
I thought this might be a great innovative project for a library development grant application so we gathered evidence to demonstrate that we believed this project would work in Canada Bay Living Learning Libraries refers to libraries' need to ensure availability of online services: Information Technology, G12: "Federated search of library catalogue and electronic databases is available.", "Library supports online interaction with customers" and "Library supports remote and in house access to databases". Customer Service G22: "Library communicates with patrons according to client preference by means such as email, SMS, RSS, online messages/announcements". Council's management plan, FuturesPlan20 shows the Canada Bay community's wish to have varied and inclusive means to make services known and available as referred to in the project purpose section of this grant application.
I thought this might be a great innovative project for a library development grant application so we gathered evidence to demonstrate that we believed this project would work in Canada Bay Living Learning Libraries refers to libraries' need to ensure availability of online services: Information Technology, G12: "Federated search of library catalogue and electronic databases is available.", "Library supports online interaction with customers" and "Library supports remote and in house access to databases". Customer Service G22: "Library communicates with patrons according to client preference by means such as email, SMS, RSS, online messages/announcements". Council's management plan, FuturesPlan20 shows the Canada Bay community's wish to have varied and inclusive means to make services known and available as referred to in the project purpose section of this grant application.
Screen shots of before and after to demonstrate differences