Introduction – a disruptive technology

At the time of publication, by many metrics, the use of mobile devices is expected to exceed that of desktop platforms (Farago, 2012). This massive growth of mobile devices has sparked among publishers a perception that there is community demand for mobile apps and, for the most part, publishers have provided a timely, wide and varied response to this perceived demand. The technological solutions buried in their responses however, threaten to disrupt the current academic models of use and JISC (2014) (the UK's academic network which provides central licensing for the UK academic community, a high speed Janet6 network and RandD in library technology) is at the forefront of addressing the issues raised by this shift. Added to this disruption is the issue of whether the academic community does actually have the appetite for apps which the general public would seem to enjoy.

JISC's concern is natural, as the way in which mobile resources threaten to break the existing models for discovery and research pedagogy, access and authentication, application and content usability and even current licensing impacts many areas of JISC involvement in the sector. Added to that threat is the continuing evolution of mobile devices themselves, as the concept of wearable technology has moved from ‘in five years’ time’ to today's cutting edge (Johnson et al., 2013).

Engagement

A series of workshops (Eventbrite, 2013) was held by JISC in late 2013, involving over 30 separate publishers and 40 different academic institutions, in order to engage with in order to bring those two communities together, to shine a light on some of the developing changes mobile use has brought and to determine if there was a way ahead to mitigate the problems that they were causing. For a series of events involving both publishers and academic librarians there was perhaps a surprising degree of unanimity in both the problems identified and some of the solutions suggested. The key areas identified were:

Discovery

Resource discovery on mobile devices and apps can be very poor, with app-based access siloing content. Linking to content becomes much more difficult, with direct links often failing and poor log-in interfaces resulting in the user becoming lost in a resource even after following a direct link.