Building and Evaluating a Mobile Application for an Academic Library

In order to stay relevant to the needs of the modern users, libraries need to make their catalogs and other services easily accessible on mobile devices. Libraries face a number of unique challenges in this process related to ´mobilizing´ catalog access, integration third-party information systems, and operating with very limited resources. This paper describes an effort to create a mobile application for an academic library, which includes identifying library services relevant to mobile users, minimizing development costs by utilizing a number of open-source components, and evaluating the usability of the resulting application.