How do you get started on a project like this? What if you don't have a ton of technical knowledge, or you don't have a lot of confidence in the knowledge you do have?

Just start. Start by dreaming. As Jason Griffey says in Mobile Technology and Libraries: “So, think of all of the things your library does, from acquisitions to instruction. How can these things be embedded in people's lives? What could you accomplish if your patrons could be in contact with you not at any point in their day, but at every point in their day?”⁷

You'll be able to come up with more creative dreams, and more ideas of how to implement them, if you monitor tech news sources. Ideally this includes a mix of library and nonlibrary experts. Since you're reading an issue of Library Technology Reports, you may well already be doing this. However, if you're looking for more ideas, there's a list of options in the resources section at the end of this chapter.

Once you have an idea, set out to prototype it. When it doesn't work—it probably won't, the first time—figure out why. Don't frame this as incompetence. Frame this as an information need: this is your prototype telling you about the holes in your knowledge. You're a librarian. You're great at identifying information needs and finding resources to meet them.

You may think you don't have the background knowledge to implement a prototype, but here's a dirty little secret of technology: you don't have to know very much, or implement things very elegantly, to come up with a real thing that works for people. (The programmers in the audience may be nodding their heads in understanding right now.) There's a huge volume of knowledge involved in doing things well, but comparatively very little in getting started.

If you get stuck along the way, though, here are four resources to try:

• Google. Especially if you're writing code, chances are good someone has already solved the problem. Find out how they did it. (If you're stuck on an error message, copy and paste that into Google.)
• Books. Librarians love books, right? If there's an O'Reilly Media book covering what you're trying to do, get it.
• Classes. Sometimes it's nice to have someone hold your hand or give you an excuse to learn things.
• Other people. This is the best resource if you can get it, not only because people can tailor their explanations to your individual needs, but because spending time with other technologists will expose you to best practices and new possibilities and feed your creative spark. Following them on social media is a start, but even better is to look for tech-related meetups in your area, to go to conferences (even if they're virtual!) with an eye toward meeting people, to go to places in your area where technologists congregate, and to collaborate with other technologists (whether or not they are librarians or part of your institution).

What if you feel you don't have the technical skills to prototype the service you'd like to see? Again, I urge collaboration, but I also encourage you to learn. The single biggest difference I have seen between people who have substantial technical skills and those who do not isn't intelligence or education—indeed, many prominent technologists have little formal education in the subject. The main differentiator is fearlessness. If you have the confidence to try to build something, and fail, and try again—to read through code or documentation you don't understand without being afraid because you're willing to fight through until it makes sense—you have the fundamental skill you need to build things with software. And I'd like to push you farther on that path. So here are ten easy things you can do right now to increase your knowledge of and competence with the technologies discussed in this report:

• Use a smartphone, e-reader, or tablet (or whatever other gadget has just come out). If you don't have one, borrow one. Explore all the features and settings you can find. Then try to use the library through that device. What can you do? What can't you? What's easy? What's needlessly difficult—and what makes it difficult? How does the mobile Web look different from the desktop version? If you can get your hands on multiple devices, how do they differ? What inspiring things could this gadget do that your library doesn't (presently) support?
• Set up a blog on WordPress.com. Write a post. Customize the theme. Search for, and install, a plugin through the dashboard interface.
• View source on a webpage. Every web browser lets you see the code it's using to generate the page you're looking at. The command varies in different browsers, but it's probably under the View menu, with the word Source in it. If you compare the code to what you see, you can figure out what some of it does. If you get stuck, there are tutorials at W3Schools.com (look for the HTML tutorials). Many of these will let you type in your own code and see what the result looks like. Then tweak what you've typed and see what changes.
• Look at the stylesheets, too. (When you're viewing source, there will be a line that looks something like <link href=“someurl.css” type=“text/css” rel=“stylesheet”>. The part after href is what you want.) Again, compare the code to what you see. Can you find things that control the color, size, shape, or location of objects on the page? Again, there are tutorials at W3Schools.com—look for the CSS tutorials.
• Start reading a tech blog, news site, or mailing list: for instance, one of the ones listed above. It's okay if you don't understand everything they're talking about—in fact, it's better (you're learning). Google the unfamiliar terms if they're interesting. But mostly, listen to the sense of possibility that underpins the conversations. Look for where the cutting edge is. How do people who are passionate about tech think and talk about it? What are they excited about building? For extra credit, subscribe to, and read, your source with an RSS reader (or other appropriate app) on a mobile device.
• Pick a service from this report that you're unfamiliar with. Go to its website and explore everything it offers. Think about how that might, or might not, translate to your library.
• Then pick another service and compare. What do the differences tell you about what sorts of things might be possible, and where limitations might come in?
• Pick something. Try it. Sketch out a plan, build a prototype.
• Write a program. Python is a beginner-friendly language, and Google's Python Class is a great tutorial covering the basics. If you have never programmed anything before, some of the terminology here will be unfamiliar. Again, be fearless. You can look up the meanings of words. You can run the sample code even if you don't understand all the words. You can try making small changes to the code and see how it affects the output. And if you're really stuck, find someone to ask for help. (You can ask me.)
• Assume it's possible. It probably is. Don't think, “I don't know how to do this, so I can't.” Instead: “There's a way to do anything I can imagine; I just have to figure out how.” If a patron asked you how to accomplish something, you'd come up with some answers, right? You wouldn't give up until that patron had some great ideas to work with. Do the reference interview with yourself, and find answers.

WordPress.com

http://wordpress.com

W3Schools.com

www.w3schools.com

Google's Python Class

http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class

One thing that came up repeatedly as I talked to librarians across the country in preparing this report is that the greatest barrier to implementing these services is knowledge. Librarians who have pressed, unsuccessfully, for mobile services to be implemented speak of their colleagues’ lack of vision for the possibilities offered by the technology. Librarians who have implemented services sometimes talk of being the only one on staff with the ability to do so. While one person can—with a remarkably small knowledge of programming!—implement impressive and useful things, one person alone often cannot maintain the service as technology changes or expand it beyond a pilot stage. Furthermore, libraries that rely on a single person to implement mobile services are highly vulnerable if that person leaves. If you're the designated single person who knows about technology, how can you encourage others to learn more?

Use new devices. Get together a collection of different device types, whether from your own collection or your staff's personal technology, and have a technology petting zoo—a low-stress, playful way to encourage exploration and competence. Or put together a tech focus group, involving staff (and patrons!) who use different kinds of technology. Talk about how you use them, and how you'd like to. Explore how library services look different on different devices.

Provide training. While some people are happy to dive in and explore unfamiliar technology, others need more explicit training. This will not only enable them to use technology, but reduce fear (which may be driving them to reflexively oppose change) and help them help patrons. Jason Griffey's Mobile Technology and Libraries has good suggestions about doing this in the context of an academic library; Jessamyn West's Without a Net has practical advice on teaching technology to people with extremely low levels of familiarity and high levels of technostress.⁸ Keep in mind that people may need training, not just on technology, but also on the norms of using it. Also keep in mind that, if you're the lone tech-savvy person, you probably need to break down your teaching into much smaller steps than you are used to.

Think interdisciplinary. Mobile services can be inherently interdisciplinary. In fact, most of the services discussed in this book have both a back-office IT component and a patron-facing, human-interaction component; technology inherently crosses the reference/technical services boundary. You may need to start in one or two departments that are most comfortable with technology and roll it out from there, but think about how technology can be used to break silos, too.

Establish communities of interest or practice. Training can be formal, but it can also be informal and staff-led. Three possibilities:

1. Bring people together for lunchtime tech talks (food is a great incentive), and have them take turns sharing a technology of interest. It's okay if it's not a hugely advanced one; the most important thing is to build a culture where discussing technology, and even leading discussions of it, is the norm.
2. Run a 23 Things program, and if at all possible find a way to give prizes or professional development credits to people who successfully complete it. For examples, see Helene Blowers’ original Charlotte-Mecklenburg 23 Things program or Vermont's statewide initiative.
3. Think about how you can use online training materials to create a culture of self-teaching and to spawn self-sustaining communities of learners. Emily Clasper discussed how she's doing this for her library consortium at Internet Librarian 2011; her slides are available online.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg 23 Things

http://plcmcl2-things.blogspot.com

Vermont's 23 Things

http://vermontlibrarieslearn.wordpress.com

From Training to Learning, Emily Clasper

www.slideshare.net/eclasper1/from-training-to-learning-9779321

Share! If you're built something, don't hide it. Tell your colleagues, local media, and library technologists nationwide what you did and how you did it. Provide step-by-step instructions and lessons learned. Document your work in central, authoritative sources like the Library Success wiki, not just your website. If there's code, give it an open-source license and put it up on your website or—better yet—a standard, shared repository like GitHub or SourceForge. Don't make others reinvent the wheel.

Library Success wiki

www.libsuccess.org

It's easy to be overwhelmed by the process of putting together a new tool or service and to feel like we're done as soon as it works. But we're not; documentation, assessment, and knowledge diffusion need to be part of the plan from the beginning. Unless we not only

consider what we learned, but how others can learn, we're not getting maximum benefit from technology.

My hope, in writing this LTR, was that I'd find a few innovative examples of libraries using mobile technology in unexpected ways, write case studies, and be done. Instead, what I found was enormous talent and optimism from librarians nationwide, coupled with frustration that they weren't able to apply it in these directions.

Maybe this is simply the wrong direction to be looking. Maybe there are not enough prospective patrons, outside of white affluent academia, who can be reached by mobile technologies. Maybe the librarians with the skills to implement such services aren't in those places.

I don't believe this, though. I spoke to tech-savvy librarians at a wide range of institutions in very different regions of the country. I know from personal experience that you can go a long way with remarkably little knowledge of hardware and code as long as you're willing to try. And the device penetration and usage statistics from Pew are simply staggering. Yes, cutting edge devices are likely to always be in the hands of the wealthy and highly educated, and yes, availability varies geographically in ways that are poorly reflected by many of our (often national level) statistics. Yet the patterns of device usage and ownership we see don't conform to naive stereotypes.

Here is an example. One of the people I corresponded with in preparing this report was Lisa Craig-Young, a reference and instruction librarian at Coastal Bend College in Texas. In her words, “Our college covers 9 counties; we have one main campus and 3 satellite campuses, and we are a Hispanic-serving institution. The median income of most of the population is <$40,000 per household and persons living in poverty range from 20–30% depending on location.” And she says iPhones are “very popular” among her students.

At first, this blew my mind. A low-income, largely rural Hispanic population working on their associates’ degrees (Coastal Bend is a community college) is not exactly the stereotype of iPhone users. But as I read more widely about smartphone adoption, and as Ms. Craig-Young told me more about her patrons, it started to make sense.

An iPhone is mind-boggling in this context if you think about it as substituting for a phone. It's not. The iPhone is substituting for a desktop or laptop computer—a more expensive device that many of her patrons do not own. And its data plan is substituting for home broadband access, which many of her patrons can't get (whereas wireless coverage is much more widespread); see figures 16 and 17.

The phenomenon of leapfrogging—where cell service has become widespread among populations that never owned a landline phone—is well known in developing countries. Craig-Young's patrons are showing a different kind of leapfrogging: skipping straight past the “normal” desktop experience of the Internet to a mobile one. In a world where Android smartphones are free and wireless data plans more widely available than home broadband, this is a wholly rational, comparatively frugal way for people to own their own computing power and Internet access. But in a world where online interfaces, and library services, are designed desktop-first, mobile-later-maybe-never, these patrons are shut out of increasingly important ways to participate in political, civic, and cultural life.

I've come to believe in writing this report that we can, and should, be doing more than we are to take advantage of technology. Many things are easier, and cheaper, to implement than they seem. The opportunities we can create by being able to write only a few dozen lines of code—or even adapt someone else's!—are enormous. The services that make sense vary by population, and only your local knowledge can address that, particularly as many statistics are collected only on a national level. But those national statistics tell a more nuanced tale than stereotypes and media images paint. They show that there is potential for widespread, intriguing, and audacious use of mobile technology in library services, if only we don't assume that there's not.

While these resources are divided into library and nonlibrary sources, I strongly believe that a good library tech education requires paying attention to both. The library sources are more likely to discuss how technologies dovetail with library possibilities or have been implemented in libraries; the nonlibrary sources show a broader range of perspectives (which includes what your patrons may be thinking!) and often run closer to the bleeding edge.