CIL - Day 3 - Building Community & Mobile Experience

This session, my last for Computers in Libraries 2011, was a mild disappointment. The first part of the presentation, done by Bonnie Roalsen and Ryan Livergood, Dover Town Library, was actually quite good, although short. Bonnie and Ryan described the use of QR Codes for various library programs in an affluent community with high cell phone/smart phone ownership. These programs included:

• A summer reading program that utilized a QR coded scale model of the solar system scattered throughout the community
• A program where seed packets with QR codes were distributed and the QR codes were placed next to the plants. The codes would point to pages about the plants and somehow the participants were encouraged to grow the seeds in places away from the community in their summer travels and then plotted on Google Earth.
• QR code scavenger hunts

The second portion of the session was Boris Zetterlund from Axiell Library Group in Sweden. He described in general terms his company's creation of an iPhone/Android app which could be used to access information about different cultural institutions in a community. There were some interesting ideas, but no information that I found would be useful in trying to implement an app of this sort.