Love it or hate it (or, like me, be completely torn over it), the iPhone is changing the way we function in our day to day lives.  You may not have one (I don’t), but you probably know a few people who do (assuming you’re in an area serviceable by AT&T). Watching folks who’ve mastered their iPhones can be inspiring. Not sure where to go for lunch? With a shake of their phone, they’ve got great suggestions at their fingertips. Not sure if that picture you just hung on the wall is level? Using the level app, they can tell you.

And now you can add all around life-saver to the list of things the iPhone is besides, well, a phone. This from Wired.com’s Gadget Lab:

Man Buried in Haiti Rubble Uses iPhone to Treat Wounds, Survive

…

After being crushed by a pile of rubble, Woolley [a US Filmmaker in Haiti at the time of the earthquake] used his digital SLR to illuminate his surroundings and snap photos of the wreckage in search of a safe place to dwell. He took refuge in an elevator shaft, where he followed instructions from an iPhone first-aid app to fashion a bandage and tourniquet for his leg and to stop the bleeding from his head wound, according to an MSNBC story.
The app even warned Woolley not to fall asleep if he felt he was going into shock, so he set his cellphone’s alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes. Sixty-five hours later, a French rescue team saved him.

While this is just a plain cool story (aside from the overall grimness of any news out of Haiti right now),  there’s a larger message here, and one that libraries would do well to heed: As a culture, we’re getting used to having a world of information available at our fingertips. We’re decreasingly tied to our desktop or even laptop computers, and are relying more and more on the increasingly powerful computers that fit in the palm of our hands.

Earlier this morning, I sat in on a webinar sponsored by Educause called Library in Your Pocket that highlighted the mobile efforts of the North Carolina State University library. I suspect the archive of that event will be available shortly, and would recommend it to any larger library systems that have some developers on staff.

But one point that the speakers made is that even with no tech expertise, you can create a mobile presence just by utilizing some free tools like WordPress.com to create a mobile-friendly website with some basic information about your library (hours, locations, upcoming events) which can allow mobile visitors to your library get access to the stuff they may want on the fly.

What about your library? What are you doing at your library to connect to users on their mobile devices? Let us know in the comments!

Tags: cell phones, iphone, mobile

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.