Current Cites for November 2011 is out! You can find the issue here...

I've got two 'cites' this month: one on Libraries moving to Drupal and another on the use (or non-use as the case may be) of Library Subject Guides by college students.

Tell Me Something I Don't Know

Can it be called research when these are the results?

"The analysis revealed that Facebook offers a dynamic environment for academic libraries to cultivate relationships with students. Libraries present information through status messages which suggest who they are and what they do. In addition to being informational, libraries attempt to engage and establish rapport with students through Facebook. The university setting not only creates a context for messages, but also offers a mutual set of experiences and values shared by libraries and students."

Is It Really Mobile?

Josh Marshall, publisher of Talking Points Memo, looks at traffic on his site and points to the still modest but continually increasing share that 'mobile' is taking:

"The additional wrinkle here is that 77% of that mobile traffic you see in the chart is from iOS devices, i.e., iPhones, iPads, iPods, etc. So give or take, around 40% of the visits to TPM come from computers or devices that use an operating system built by Apple. Compare that to 20% only 5 years ago."

The question is, is this really mobile? iPads for example are far more likely to be connected via wireless rather than through a phone company and screen-wise, it's a whole different user-experience. For purposes of analysis, I think it'd be far more helpful -- in fact, increasingly so -- to approach the data as 'mobile' AND 'tablet'.

Thank You, Flash, for Showing Us the Way!

So the big news is that Adobe is ending Flash development for mobile devices.

Everyone's assuming, for this reason, that Flash's days are numbered. And well they may be, in which case, there's no better time to extol its virtues -- particularly the contribution it's made to our online world -- than now.

It's important to remember that before the Web, most communication online was largely through command line input. In fact, one of the great 'side' achievements of the WWW was that it liberated us from this tyranny, giving us a 'graphical user interface' instead. In the library world, this was the difference between DIALOG which only a consultant could make head or tail of and current versions of Ebsco or Proquest.

Flash (and its predecesso­r, Shockwave) took this a step further by introducing a far higher level of interactivity. It allowed us to click on things, enlarge them, drag them across the browser window. It allowed us to better coordinate various types of media -- images, audio and video -- into a unified user experience. In fact, it did this with video so well that many people nowadays think of Flash as primarily a video delivery system.

And maybe it is, or was. Things move on. What we used to do in Flash, we're slowly being able to accomplish using Javascript, CSS and eventually HTML5. That's the path -- but it was Flash that showed us the way.