Throughout the project, we’ve been collecting existing online resources via social bookmarking services, and gathering evidence of what works and what doesn’t in various different areas of mobile technologies in libraries. In order to share this information, we’ve brought together a series of documents under the umbrella of Pathways To Best Practice.

Rather than focus on specific technologies, the guides focus on benefits for the library and present different ways to utilise mobile technologies to help achieve that benefit. Each one contains its state of maturity, an overview of options, some examples of projects, lessons learned from work so far, key contacts within the area, and additional resources and links.

Though the main focus of our research has been the UK Education sector (as the project is JISC-funded), they also include examples from other libraries and information centres and many of the lessons learned will be applicable to other sectors.

Full list of the Pathways To Best Practice guides:

• 1: Introducing users to the library
• 2: Helping on-site users – roving support
• 3: Helping users within the library – guides and signage
• 4: Providing access to resources via mobile devices
• 5: Developing a mobile strategy for the library
• 6: Managing borrower accounts
• 7: Bibliographic management
• 8: Loaning mobile devices
• 9: Supporting learning, teaching and research
• 10: Collection management

If you wish to save a copy of a guide, email it or print it out (you can choose which section to save/print), you can do so using the button at the bottom of each page:

Print PDF Email button

If you have anything you would like to comment on (or wish to share additional information), please feel free to leave a comment under the relevant guide. We hope you find them useful!

NB: All the guides were updated in August 2012 by Jo Alcock as part of the JISC m-library community support project.