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Thin client, meet the mobile future: never before have our grand research libraries and universities needed to listen to us more as they struggle to retool for the mobile era.

Article Excerpt
In understanding how current technologies are impacting digital library development and services, it can be very useful to stay familiar with the literature of the whole of the internet era, not just the most recent 5 years' worth. It's tempting, even for doctoral students in classic disciplines such as psychology, to overlook what was "new and good" in the not-so-recent past; indeed, this is a major concern for faculty who teach doctoral students. For us, with our intense focus on high-quality services and collections that are coherent and useful in today's warp-speed technological marketplace, it's reassuring to remember that "What is past is prologue." The exciting mobile explosion of 2007 and 2008 puts me in mind of something Nicholas Negroponte described in the 1995 classic, Being Digital (Vintage Books). He portrayed a day in his life at MIT, watching all the "cyborgs" running along the Charles River or walking across campus, multitasking all the way. Yep--mobile was good even then. The mobile technology users of 1995 must be flabbergasted by the power and growing ease of use in the mobile universe of 2009. Texting, movies, video, email, web surfing, Flickring, Twittering--take your pick. But the abundance brings its dilemmas. In the midst of this sea of applications, many of which carry blue-sky potential for innovation, what's a digital librarian to do?

Answer: Get with the program. On a personal level, that means taking the dive and buying the gadgets that people are using, from the iPhone on. For institutions, it means much...

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