Mobile phones? In MY library??

The phone rings in the library, and everyone in a twenty foot radius starts looking around for the principle to show up and send us all to detention. There’s not much worse than getting to the end of a climactic space battle when someone’s phone goes off in the quiet section and ruins your moment.

Everyone on earth has written a thinkpiece about those dang millennials and their smartphone, but I agree completely with Héctor L. Carral at Huffington Post. It’s time to we cut it out with the myth that iPhones are preventing us from really experiencing our life around us. We need to start thinking of smartphones as tools for building community rather than as shields that keep us apart. Ultimately, phones were invented to facilitate communication. Now, we can use them as additional access points for information – but the point of learning things is to share that knowledge with others.

A lot of libraries are already moving in the right direction. Many libraries already offer a mobile app that at least allows patrons to browse their catalogs.

For this topic, I’d really like to highlight Bibliocommons. I had the opportunity to attend a Bibliocommons workshop and I really believe this could be a great step towards bringing the catalog into the future. Part discovery service, part social media network, Bibliocommons is attempting to build a community like Goodreads out of the user’s local library, and they’re bringing it right into the palm of your hand. Additionally, Bibliocommons’ robust keyword-based algorithms provide the search experience that many patrons are used to from Google or Amazon, while simultaneously blending in more traditional library metadata.

So, yes, it’s time that we welcome phones into the library, as important tools for information access and community building. Just make sure to keep it on silent.