More on Wireless Librarian

[JQ Johnson]

Tangential to wireless lan access in libraries, is anyone developing
strategies for dealing with wireless palmtop computing?  Strategies for
wireless palmtop are all the rage in the larger computer industry.  Many
forecasts suggest that within the next year or two there will be more Palm
type devices with cellular modems and smart cellphones surfing the web
than desktops+laptops.

Palm type devices create their own opportunities and problems.  For
example, it is likely that the next couple of generations of such devices
will have very small screens and low bandwidth connections to the web.
There is much interest in WAP and WML as an alternative to HTTP and HTML
for delivery of web-page-like information.  On the other hand, they are
likely to be ubiquitous, cheap, and well integrated with the phone system.
Etc.  We're obviously going to have standards and OS wars, with the PalmOS
devices encouraging very different approaches to information delivery from
the WinCE devices.

So what are we as libraries going to do about them?

JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  mailto:jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       phone: 1-541-346-1746; -3485 fax
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jqj/