Although I have way too many course writing things to do at the mo, I have managed to wangle a day a week doing things for the Library for 3 months or so, which should be a lot of fun:-)
The job spec is still not totally sorted, but I'm hoping that one payoff will be that I get to promote some of my library related doodles to people who might actually be able to sponsor their use in some way (not that anything I've produced is production stable, of course!) as well as gaining a bit more inside knowledge about the Library's systems (I would love to be able to doodle with an XML front end to the library catalogue, for example...).
Anyway - one thing that has been mooted as something that I might mull over is My Pocket Library, a version of the library website, I guess, that's appropriate for viewing on mobile devices....which is one area I'm way out of my depth in, of course!
Never having got around to building anything in J2ME, about the only mobile thing I've ever doodled with are a couple of WAP sites built years ago when I was chasing a microinfo/microcontent vibe (one site was a proof of concept/demonstrator for , another for the Technology Short Course/Relevant Knowledge programme).
Anyway, the idea behind My Pocket Library may just be mobile appropriate content/navigation/styling, of course, or it may be more ambitious/application oriented - in which case, serendipity perhaps smiled on me today when I picked up on Opera widgets (I don't know where from...?!).
These are very much in the flavour of Yahoo/Konfabulator or Mac Dashboard widgets, Google gadgets(? or is it Microsoft gadgets? I forget now...!) which I skirted around some time ago (e.g. with a course news widget), only this time requiring a (still beta) recent version of Opera.
From the odd mobile devices I've seen, Opera seems to be a reasonably widely used mobile browsing platform (also see Mobile Web 2.0 and Opera mini, and, even better, this Opera AJAX Platform/toolkit), so it may be worth trying to doodle a widget or too (by pillaging the Opera widget gallery probably!) to consume some library services.
There's a secondary payoff too in that any widgets would also run on the desktop Opera browser, which may be interesting if it were installed on some of the public access machines in the library...
Posted by ajh59 at April 7, 2006 01:26 AM