Interestingly, I can’t remember work related campus visits anywhere north of New York City in the east and San Francisco in the west (although I did travel to cities for conferences in Washington and Boston, I never visited campuses for work).

I counted the number of people that have contacted us about the mobile site and we are up to 15+ including people from 5 different countries. It is an exciting time to be in this space–it feels very much like the web in the late 90s. I am really enjoying getting a chance to be a part of an innovative team here at NCSU and can’t wait for what is around the bend.

Our internal promotions group created this fantastic little video to promote the site. I think it says just about enough so that people will get to the mobile site to take a look. It makes me want to explore doing more with video and experiment with very short instructional clips. I want to make a 60 second video on how to find a book and even borrowed one of the library Flip cameras this week to experiment but that project will have to be pushed back to another day.

NCSU Libraries Mobile has launched! Point your mobile device browser to: m.lib.ncsu.edu and check it out. The new site, designed for all types of web enabled mobile devices, was developed by Jason Casden, Markus Wust, and myself using open source code developed by MIT and the NC State Mobile Web team (http://m.ncsu.edu). Many of the features expand on services developed by Markus and Tito Sierra for
the Libraries’ MobiLIB site (which set the standard for mobile library sites).
I am excited about the future of the mobile projects here at the library. My library mobile development philosophy is to focus on more action oriented services. For instance, I want a student to be able to pick up her phone and be able to request a laptop or reserve a study room faster than she would be able to do that on our website. I expect our next iteration of the mobile site will include more of this functionality.
Send me an email if you want to learn more about the project or have any suggestions or bug reports!

I have been thinking about new library spaces and services a great deal lately since the new Hunt Library at NCSU is a popular topic of conversation lately so I took advantage of being in SLC and took a field trip to the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. I also visited the newish public library and the LDS Family History Library (to complete the trifecta) and took some photos:

It is clear that Utah likes libraries!

I am excited to see what becomes of Wolfram Alpha since it has a lot of potential to help with simple to complex ready reference or computational type questions (where facts are involved).  What I am really curious about is how users are going to know what they can do with the system.  It sounds like it can do oh so much, but what would I use it for?  When would I know to go to Alpha?

From the advance previews of the system (ReadWriteWeb, among others), it sounds like the results will be paired with traditional search engine results so if I am asking a subjective question such as, “What is the best restaurant in Chapel Hill?” it can return results more relevant to the query.  It is going to offer massive amounts of curated data and presentation of your data results in contextually relevant ways.  As they start to offer enterprise versions of the system, I imagine they will start to compete with products from companies like SAS.  Also, will Google start doing something similar?

The system is getting a public demo with a live webinar this week at Harvard on April 26th at 3pm.