This week (and part of next) I am in jury duty. Thankfully the jury pool room has free wifi so I have been able to keep up with the online world a bit (If my laptop battery lasts, there are precious few electrical outlets).
This morning I received an email from another librarian asking me how I use an iPad as a librarian. Well, I don’t have an iPad. I am saving up for one when the iPad 3 comes out. So a lot of the ways I would use an iPad are still just guesses for me.
So I posted the question on the iMedicalApps forum, “How Do Librarians Use iPads.” My hope is that librarians with iPads will answer how they use their iPad in the job and how it is a better tool or solves a need that previous tools (laptops, desktops, smartphones, etc.) didn’t.
I have had a non-i-Pad tablet since summer 2011, and, pleasant suprise, found it quite useful for work. For example, met up with a clinician outside the library who reported problems accessing lit. search results I had emailed to him. I was able to 1. pull up my webmail and verify which email he had received, 2. test the links in my copy of the email and verify that the links worked, and 3, do a quick PubMed search to demonstrate for him what he should be seeing / doing with the results. Then I re-sent the original email to his address so he could try again. We did all that in the hallway while talking. I also took it to a patient-oriented forum and was able to demonstrate online videos (flash) on our website to people with questions.
Hello Ms. Krafty
I’m a librarian at GSI. and I agree with you that iPad is a useful device for librarians. very useful 😉