Mobile information


of the big ones have trials. The Scopus app is a really good deal – and having mobile access to it is awesome because lots of people can’t afford the full product.’ But there are some things that he’d like to see improved with apps. ‘I find that, if tools only give abstracts, students don’t like them and develop a hatred of the library,’ he remarked. He also bemoaned apps that are ‘just a skinned website and maybe not even mobile-optimised.’ Many of Allison’s and Carlos’s comments and concerns were echoed in presentations by developers of such tools for researchers. Greg Aspin of EBSCO, explained that the company chose to develop mobile products to promote usage growth. Its approach is to have one code base. ‘This allows us to be very agile and get functionality out much more quickly. It gives maximum user-reach and flexibility for product-specific mobile solutions,’ he explained.


What Aspin was describing was a key theme in many conversations at the SLA meeting: the idea of responsive design, where websites are designed so that they fit the screen size and specifications of the device that is connecting to them.


‘Mobile is about movement and is therefore unpredictable. Whatever we deliver has to keep pace. There are vast differences between


mobile devices. Every imaginable device connects to our system and we don’t want to alienate any users,’ he continued. ‘We don’t want to link people back to a standard site. It needs to be intuitive.’ And there are some other things that users want. A common theme in the presentations was that, if full text is available to them, users want to be able to access it from their mobile devices. In addition, as Aspin noted, localisation is important. ‘Users are worldwide and there are different languages,’ he observed. And then there are differences in how people want to use content. ‘Some customers build their own custom mobile apps and they want to pull in our content. I help customers with this,’ said Aspin.


Mobile traffic is still relatively small. According to Aspin, mobile usage now peaks to four per cent of traffic to EBSCO content, with iPads accounting for half of this. However, this is significantly up from the company’s mobile traffic peak of one per cent in 2011 – and, in some cases, the traffic is much higher. In South Korea, for example, where there is very high mobile usage, the company says that mobile access counts for 10 per cent of its total traffic. Despite EBSCO’s focus on mobile websites, however, Aspin still sees a need for apps in some cases too. ‘A lot of content needs to be


FEATURE


used offline, for example medical resources like DynaMed, and here we offer a weekly download,’ he said.


The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has encountered similar challenges and considerations in developing its mobile strategy. Its first mobile app was in 2009, although Steven Hawthorne, the company’s executive director, sales, marketing and strategic partnerships, joked at the SLA meeting that when the RSC began in 1841, ‘mobile’ meant ‘a piece of paper’.


‘Some customers build their own custom mobile apps and they want to pull in our content. I help


customers with this’ Greg Aspin, EBSCO


The reasons behind the society’s first app, for the magazine Chemistry World, he said, were to get close to the reader, discover new audiences and in response to reader demand. ‘Apps puts research into the hands of chemists,’ said Hawthorne. Since then there have been plenty more developments (see product focus section, pages 24-28) and plenty more are planned too. ‘We want to try and use all the functionality on mobile device to get the most of apps,’ he said. One example of this is an idea being developed, called ChemGoggles, which uses the camera on mobile devices to capture chemical structures in papers and then search for them in ChemSpider.


There is other functionality on the phone that can be used too. ‘We’ve not developing apps to make money, but to engage with users,’ Hawthorne explained. One way to do this is to take advantage of the geopositioning capabilities of the smartphone. ‘We’re developing an app of chemistry landmarks and we’ll provide photos and directions,’ he said. If such projects are successful in engaging people, they could end up inspiring the next generation of students and researchers to study chemistry and to form their own opinions of, or even develop themselves, the mobile chemistry apps of the future.


FURTHER INFORMATION The Royal Society of Chemistry’s NPU Alerts app enables users to search on natural products to find chemical structures www.researchinformation.info @researchinfo


Useful wiki for scientific mobile applications www.scimobileapps.com/index.php?title=Main_Page


AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2013 Research Information 23


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32