LITA west

Expanding Access to Library Collections and Services Using Small-Screen Devices

Mark Andy West, Arthur W. Hafner, and Bradley D. Faust

Mark Andy West (MAWest2@bsu.edu) is Microcomputer/Systems/Network Analyst, Arthur W. Hafner (AHafner@bsu.edu) is Dean of University Libraries, and Bradley D. Faust (Bfaust@bsu.edu) is Assistant Dean for Library Information Technology Services at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.

This research report summarizes the challenges and solutions with using small-screen mobile computing devices to access library resources and services. These smart-devices include notebook computers, Palm/PocketPC devices, and Internet-enabled multipurpose personal communication de-vices like cellular phones and BlackBerry units that support voice and data services.

Two key findings are that (1) library Web sites can be adapted to the limited power, memory, small screen size, and bandwidth of mobile devices, and (2) small-screen mobile devices are acceptable for showing Web services that are easy to read, easy to navigate, and that provide timely information.

The mission of the Ball State Universi-ty Libraries (BSUL) is to support student pursuits for academic success and faculty endeavors for knowledge creation and classroom instruction. Through its programs, services, and collections, BSUL has embraced the new, emerging, instructional technologies that have become available to enhance and fulfill their mission. New communication technologies have come to fruition in the past few years and one of these, the small-screen device, has been incorporated into BSUL’s pursuit of expanding instructional strategies.

Imagine yourself walking about on campus. You find people sitting on benches or in the grass working on their laptops or handheld computers. You find people walking about, talking on their cell phones. And you find people talking or typing on their BlackBerry units, which combine cell phones, pocket organizers, and e-mail readers.

The common thread in all of these devices is that they are portable and are easily carried in your hand, on your belt, or in a backpack. These portable, mobile devices have Internet connectivity, and almost all of them have browsers with which to surf the Web. Common among all of these mobile devices are the capabilities of listening to music and small screens for watching videos and reading text.

The popularity, rapid adoption, and increased functionality of these devices continue to grow.¹ Enhancements have taken place in cell-phone network infrastructure, and wireless networks and hotspots have emerged in community places such as airports, hotels, libraries, and stadiums.² As a result, these small-screen, mobile devices are in an excellent position for new educational and pedagogical applications, such as those in Project Numina at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.³

The new information technologies are changing the way today’s students access information, and that affects how they are learning.

Challenges

Mobile devices, however, lacked easy access to the resources and services of BSUL’s Web site. The barriers that limited accessibility for mobile devices presented a challenge for BSUL to overcome in order to continue expanding their mission for and obligation to students and faculty.⁴

Device Limitations

A typical mobile device has a small screen: 240 pixels wide for handhelds, 120 pixels for cell phones. This makes large images, Web pages with more than one column, and Web pages that are content-rich difficult, if not impractical, to display.

The typical mobile device does not have much memory: only sixty-four megabytes of memory for handhelds and less for cell phones. Much of that memory is used for other purposes, such as storing e-mails or phone numbers, or running applications. This means there is little room for cache (the storage of frequent images and pages for faster loading) and cookies (identifying packets sent from and used by Web sites) heavily used by regular Web browsers.

Furthermore, wireless connections on mobile devices are often slower than dial-up. Connections for cell phones are just as slow; plus, in connecting to the Internet, cell-phone users have the added burden of paying by the minute, by the kilobyte, or both.

Now, add to these limitations the lack of features on mobile Web browsers that desktop browsers take for granted, and one finds:

• limited or no support for such advanced Web features as tables and image maps;
• no Flash capability except on the latest Pocket PCs;

• limited or no JavaScript support even on devices that officially support it, which leaves out popup navigation menus and other neat tricks, which small screens cannot handle anyway; and

• limited device-dependent audio and video support

Fortunately, these limitations do not imply that Web pages for mobile devices cannot be made useful or even attractive. There are workarounds for these limitations that can make small-screen devices operate and function within these confines. This article documents such solutions.

Site Limitations

Another disconcerting barrier to mo-bile access is BSUL’s Web site itself. The pages on this site are generated by Vignette, an enterprise content-management system. Vignette provides BSU Web pages a uniform look as well as ease-of-site navigation. These are worthy goals in themselves. For mobile devices, however, Vignette generates Web pages that are too wide, too image-intensive, and too reliant on JavaScript for appearance and navigation. Even the more powerful Pocket PCs cannot handle Vignette-generated pages.

For BSUL, a specific, major barrier is CardCat (Cardinal Catalog), BSUL’s catalog database. It also uses JavaScript for appearance and information display. On Pocket PCs and BlackBerry units, the screens, while readable, look strange; certain elements such as item details do not appear at all. CardCat is reviewed more fully in this paper.

Project

Both device and site limitations were also encountered in other mobile projects such as the Mobile Mann Computing Project at Cornell Uni-versity.⁵ But BSUL decided to find a solution to these limitations and overcome these barriers for mobile-device access to its resources and services. As articulated by Varnum in 2000, ��If we could somehow deliver information to users on their PDAs, we could . . . quickly build a new user community.��⁶ With this in mind, a one-year mobile-development project was launched to research and devise a mobile-device interface to BSUL’s resources.

In January 2004, BSUL applied for a technology mini-grant under the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) through the Indiana State Library. The grant was approved in April. With this funding, BSUL, through its Library Information Technology Services (LITS) unit, hired a part-time mobile-computing developer who began work on a project to find a solution and resolve these limitation issues in June of the same year. LITS also assigned one of its part-time developers to assist.

For testing purposes, LITS purchased several handheld devices��a Dell Axim X30, a Hewlett-Packard iPAQ h4350, and a Palm Tungsten C. LITS also made use of several models of cell phones borrowed for two-week trials.

The result of this funding was the creation of the Mobile Development Project, which developed and initiated three services to aid our mobile users:

• a BSUL Web site adapted to mo-bile devices;

• an application for searching through BSUL’s holdings; and

• an application for querying titles from BSUL’s serial collections

Service #1: Mobile Web Site (MWS)

The mobile-computing developer took the pages of BSUL’s Web site and adapted them to the limits of mobile devices. Adaptations included providing navigational aids and making them both attractive and easy to use. Because of these adaptations, this MWS now contains the essential resources and services of BSUL www.bsu.edu/libraries/mobile (figure 1). Purposefully, specific guidelines were used for creating and adapting MWS. The guidelines for the site’s design were based on those published by the cell-phone software provider Openwave.⁷ Those used for MWS include the following five guidelines.

Figure 1. MWS Home Page

1. Conciseness. This was an im-portant issue to ensure that the user does not have to do a lot of scrolling down a page, or do any scrolling at all on any navigation page.

2. Limiting Links. Next was limiting the number of links per page to the number of cell-phone pad keys. A key was assigned to each link, allowing cell-phone browsers to easily navigate a page. If there are more links than keys on a keypad, the navigation page is split in two, as shown by the Reference Links in figure 2.

3. Descriptive Icons. Colorful, de-scriptive icons were placed next to almost every link of the site’s navigation pages to add to the appeal of the Web site. Not only are these icons attractive, they are useful as well: Pressing or tapping an icon will bring up a Help Page that briefly describes the resource or service associated with the icon.

4. Home and Parent-Link Icons. Navigation aids, consisting of at least one icon/link pair, one of which is always Home, were placed on the bottom of each page. Other icons take the user to a parent-link page. The page in figure 3 is an example of this: circled at the bottom of the architecture slides page are links to the architecture page, the collections page, and the MWS home page. These are on the bottom of a page because this is the location where a user will naturally go after scrolling down the page on a mobile browser.

5. Additional Icon Links. After the navigation links, along the bottom of each page, is a line of three links to pages that provide a description of the Web site, an opportunity to e-mail comments, and a general navigation map of the site (figure 3).

6. Library Information. MWS content includes information on BSUL’s hours, policies, departments, and collections. Additionally, there is a Reference Links section (figure 2) that provides local links to news, weather, sports, travel, and other sites especially created for mobile devices including campus e-mail.

Figure 2. Reference Links

Figure 3. Navigation Links

The use of navigation icons to overcome the limitations of mobile devices has proven to be a successful approach.

Service #2: Mobile Journals

Mobile Journals (figure 4) provides mobile-device users with a way to search for periodicals and other titles in BSUL’s serials collections.

Figure 4. Mobile Journals

The original intent for this service was to display only online journals to which BSUL subscribes. During the project, however, it was discovered that the only available services currently adapted and useable for mobile devices are Ovid@Hand, PubMed, Westlaw, and other medical, health, and legal databases whose customers were among the first to adopt mobile devices for everyday use.⁸ The project was able to increase the service of Mobile Journals by providing information on BSUL’s current, bound, and online periodicals as well as serial collections in microforms, government publications, and general collections.

With Mobile Journals it is possible to search for serial titles as an exact match or as a word or phrase in a title. Additionally, a restricted search can be made for only online publications.

Listings of journal titles (figure 5) brought up by a search query are grouped in pages of up to five titles. A user can go from page to page with navigation links on both sides of a page count. And the titles themselves have alternating colors to make the list both easier to read and to provide visual relief.

Figure 5. Mobile Journal Listing

Each title is a link, which when pressed or tapped, displays further details about the title (figure 6). If the title is online, a link to the subscription service that provides that title is made available as a hyperlink. As on a listing page, a user can go from one title to another with navigation buttons. And when returning to the listings, the user will go to the page on which the current title is found.

Figure 6. Mobile Journal Details

Service #3: CardCat Mobile

CardCat Mobile (figure 7) is a Z39.50 client that provides the mobile-device user an interface to BSUL’s catalog database.⁹

Figure 7. CardCat Mobile

CardCat Mobile provides a versatile means to send search queries to the catalog, to display the results of such queries, and to navigate among the titles in the results. A user builds a search query with the Search and Connector screens. For simple queries, the user can enter what to look for and then press Search. For complex queries, the user makes a query; goes to the Connector screen to choose a way to hook the first query to the next; then makes the next query. In this way the user can broaden or narrow a search.

The results of a search query (figure 8) are arranged one title per page. Each record is formatted in such a way as to make such title information as location and availability easy to read. Similar to a details page in Mobile Journals, a user can go from one title to another with navigation buttons. Navigation is circular: The user going backward passes the first record to the last, and going forward passes the last record to the first.

Figure 8. CardCat Details

Testing

All three services of the mobile site were tested extensively using both Palm and Pocket PCs, and with various programs that simulated BlackBerry units and cell phones using Openwave browsers (figure 9).

Figure 9. Test PDAs

MWS displayed properly, and it could be navigated well on all browsers. Both Mobile Journals and CardCat Mobile tested well on Pocket PCs and BlackBerry units. The testing also revealed another challenge to be overcome: Mobile Journals and CardCat Mobile do not work on cell-phone browsers. The search forms for each application display as intended, but an error message appears when the user sends a search query.

Mobile Journals was tested on a development Web server inside the campus network with positive results. However, Mobile Journals failed when it was put on the production Web server with a connection to the Internet. The source of the problem appears to be either the way the production Web server handles Web pages for cell phones, or the way the campus routers treat cell-phone Web pages on their way from the site to the cell phone. As of this writing, a solution has not been achieved.

As a final challenge, it was discovered that even though the visible quirks in CardCat Mobile have been fixed, there are more subtle ones that remain to be discovered and removed. This prompts a need to record errors on both Mobile Journals and CardCat Mobile in order for LITS personnel to detect and fix them when they are detected.

Summary

The Mobile Development Project has made library resources and services available with an easy-to-use interface for any mobile device for the BSU community. It is felt that any remaining challenges are surmountable and do not interfere with the use of the existing three mobile site services. Investigation, testing, and development continue to update the content, to improve the quality, and to extend the usefulness of BSUL’s mobile site so that library resources and services may truly be available to all users at BSU no matter what kind of small-screen, mobile device they may use.

References and notes

1. Michael Schuyler, ��PDA Avoidance: They’ll Get You Eventually!�� Computers in Libraries 23, no. 3 (Mar. 2003): 32��33.

2. One such is Ross-Ade Stadium at Purdue University, www.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/030906.Bottum.eathletics.html (accessed Apr. 11, 2006).

3.   Barbara P. Heath et al., ��Project Numina: Enhancing Student Learning with Handheld Computers,�� Computer 38, no. 8 (June 2005): 46��52.

4. Colleen Cuddy, Using PDAs in the Libraries (New York: Neal-Schuman, 2005), 88.

5. Michael Cook et al., ��Wireless PDA Accessibility and Applications in Academic Libraries: A Report by the Mobile Mann Computing Group,�� http://mobile.mannlib.cornell.edu/docs/mmcg_report.pdf (accessed Apr. 11, 2006).

6. Ken Varnum, ��Information @ Your Fingertips: Porting Library Services to the PDA,�� Online 24, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 2000): 15.

7. Openwave Systems, ��Best Practices in XHTML Design,�� http://developer.openwave.com/dvl/support/documentation/guides_and_references/best_practices_in_xhtml_design/index.htm (accessed Apr. 11, 2006).

8. Megan K. Fox, ��A Library in Your Palm,�� NetConnect (Spring 2003): 12��13, www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA286650.html (accessed Apr. 29, 2006).

9. National Information Standards Organization (U.S.) Information Retrieval (Z39.50): Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification (Bethesda, Md.: NISO Pr, 1995).