According to research done by the Pew Research Center, 66% of Americans age 18-29 own a smartphone. For those of you with smartphones, tablets or other mobile devices, there are many library resources that are available for you to explore on the go.
You can start with the library’s mobile website, which gives you access to library hours and phone numbers for the service desk and library staff. Then there are a wide variety of mobile websites to help with quick look ups, or to get you started on your research. Milne Library’s Guide to Mobile Resources can help you find resources formatted for your mobile device, and all of our subject guides are easily viewable on your smartphone (although the resources they point to may not be as accessible).
These mobile websites will help you find books or articles in Milne Library (either online or in print):
- Library Home Page (mobile) – Library hours, staff contact information, and links to common resources formatted for your mobile device
- GLOCAT+ (mobile) – Find books and articles available to Milne Library patrons.
- GLOCAT Classic (Mobile) – Find books, DVDs, CDs and other items from Milne’s collection. Great for quickly looking up call numbers.
- Worldcat (mobile) – Find books in libraries worldwide. Enter a zip code to find an item in a local library
A few useful apps for research.
Many of our databases also have mobile websites. If you have accounts for these databases, you can access your saved articles, citations and lists.
- EBSCOhost Mobile – Lots of databases including ERIC, GeoRef, Business Source Complete use the Ebsco Interface
- JSTOR Mobile
- Scifinder Mobile
- PubMed
Other vendors create separate mobile apps that you can download and use on your phones or tablets.
ArtStor Mobile app image search
- EBSCOhost for iOS – Provides access to Milne’s EBSCOhost subscriptions in a dedicated app for your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Includes the ability to save PDFs to outside apps, such as Google Drive, Dropbox or iBooks.
- iSSRN – Provided by the Social Science Research Network, iSSRN provides access on your iPhone or iPad to a huge amount of freely-available literature in the social sciences and humanities.
- NML for iOS – Naxos Music Library for iOS
- ARTstor Mobile
- ACS Mobile – Free. Access recently published and resources from the American Chemical Society.
- arXiv – Free. Full text access to the pre-prints available at the arXiv.org website in Physics, Mathematics, Nonlinear Sciences, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance, and Statistics.
- SciVerse ScienceDirect Premium – $2.99 per year. Full text access to the articles available on ScienceDirect, from the publisher Elsevier. iPad only.
- SciVerse Scopus Alerts (Institutional) – Free. Search science and social science literature, get citation alerts and create lists of articles. Users are required to sign up for an account at the Scopus website in order to authenticate.
- World Bank DataFinder – Free. Access World Bank Data from your phone.
- US Census Browser – iPad only. Browse data from the US 2010 Census.
Then you’ll want to get your hands on the apps that can help you get your work done. There are apps to work with citation management tools like Zotero and Mendeley, and apps to help you access documents stored in Google Drive. The EasyBib app allows you to scan the barcode of a book to automatically create a citation you can email to yourself.
While doing your research on your phone probably won’t replace hard-care searching on your computer, it is often convenient to have mobile tools to help with quick look ups or searches.
What apps or mobile resources do you use to do research?
