MACON will address challenges involved in delivering quality academic content to mobile devices in a seamless and user-friendly manner. The project will work with EBSCO, a major content and systems provider in order to prototype a mobile friendly resource discovery interface which will discover and expose quality academic content from both third party & local collections.
This project is part of the JISC Mobile Infrastructure for Libraries programme. It will start in November 2011 and finish in August 2012.
The overall objectives of the MACON project are to:
- Increase the availability of quality academic content for mobile users
- Explore and understand user requirements for the mobile delivery of academic content from both third party and local collections
- Identify and document the risks and barriers involved in making academic content accessible to mobile devices.
- Develop and evaluate an interface for discovering and exposing quality academic content to users via small screen mobile devices
- Work with EBSCO to develop and test a prototype system using a combination of open source software (Mobile Web from MIT) and the API from EBSCO Discovery Solution (EDS)
- Include open access Open University audio-visual collections in this system and identify and document the issues in accessing this type of content on mobile devices
- Produce a mobile bookmarklet tool to significantly reduce the authentication barriers for mobile users.
- Evaluate the prototype system to ascertain the usability and quality of the user experience.
- Produce a ‘good practice’ toolkit for content providers, based on the experience of the project
- Disseminate the experience of the project though workshops, conference papers, journal articles and blogs.
M-Libraries Conference 2012