Rebecca K. Miller - Tablet Computers in the Academic Library

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Tablet Computers in the Academic Library

Edited by Rebecca K. Miller, Heather Moorefield-Lang, and Carolyn Meier

An imprint of the American Library Association

CHICAGO 2014

2014 by the American Library Association

Extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of the information in this book; however, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.

ISBNs: 978-0-8389-1196-9 (ePub); 978-0-8389-1971-2 (Kindle). For more information on digital formats, visit the ALA Store at alastore.ala.org and select eEditions.

Cover design by Kimberly Thornton. Images Shutterstock, Inc.

Contents

Rebecca K. Miller

Jennifer Sparrow

Jamie Calcagno-Roach, Jonathan R. Paulo, Cindi Sandridge, and Liz Thompson

Drew Smith and Barbara Lewis

Meridith Wolnick

Amber Woodard

Marissa Ball, Adis Beesting, Ava Iuliano, George Pearson, and Consuella Askew

Neal Henshaw

Rajiv Nariani

Meredith Levin

Many thanks to our contributing authors and our editors at ALA Editions! This has been an incredible journey, and we have enjoyed every step of the way.

We also wish to thank our colleagues at University Libraries at Virginia Tech for their continuing support and patience as we pursued our interest in tablets and experimented with their uses in our own library. In particular, we wish to thank Lesley Moyo, director of research and instructional services, for her willingness to give our ideas a chancewe never would have been able to complete this project without her support.

Rebecca, Heather, and Carolyn

Rebecca K. Miller, Virginia Tech

Tablets have come to be viewed as not just a new category of mobile devices, but indeed a new technology in its own rightone that blends features of laptops, smartphones, and earlier tablet computers with always-connect Internet, and thousands of apps with which to personalize the experience.

Johnson, Adams, and Cummins (2012, p. 17)

Evolution of the Tablet Computer

A few years into what Steve Jobs dubbed the post-PC era and what Bill Gates called the PC plus era, academic libraries are still figuring out what the rise of tablet computers means for us, our institutions, and our users. The proliferation of tablets and other mobile devices, and the breathtaking speed with which they seem to be evolving, has fundamentally altered the information environment and the way that we all search for, access, and communicate information. To be sure, the information environment has constantly changed throughout history as the clay tablet, the papyrus scroll, and the parchment codex each offered new forms of information storage and communication. In his influential 1945 essay As We May Think, Vannevar Bush described the hypothetical memex, a machine that would store information and create associative trails within the information. The memex, which remained purely hypothetical, is considered a forerunner to the hypertext systems that led to the creation of the World Wide Web. Bush explained the memex as a machine that would augment the innate capabilities of an individuals brain or memory; we have been using personal computers to do this for several decades, the tablet computer has taken this idea of augmentation and networked information to an entirely new level.

While it may feel like the tablet revolution quickly sprang upon us, it is actually the product of more than 70 years of computing evolution. Apples iPad may have made the tablet computer a household item, but the idea of a tablet computer, or a computer that is completely contained in a flat touch screen used for input, has intrigued computer scientists, technology pioneers, and science fiction writers for many years. Indeed, the first patent for an electronic tablet that allowed for the input of data through an external device like a stylus was approved as far back as 1888, when Elisha Gray patented the telautograph, a predecessor of the modern fax machine. The relationship of this machine to the iPad or any other type of tablet computer currently on the market, may feel like a bit of a stretch; however, the Dynabook, conceptualized by Alan Kay in the1960s, is clearly the forefather of tablet computers, as we know them today. Mocked-up images of the Dynabook, which never made it past the development stage, show a 12 9inch flat machine, including keyboard, stylus, and graphical interfaceall very similar to the Apple iPad and Android devices that we see today (Kay & Goldberg, 1977). In an article that he coauthored with Adele Goldberg, Personal Dynamic Media, Kay wrote that the Dynabook would be small and portable as possible and could both take in and give out information in quantities approaching that of human sensory systems (1977, p. 31). Kay, who is also credited with conceptualizing the laptop, envisioned the Dynabook as a tool for enhancing the infrastructure of education, and we will discuss this a bit more in the section on teaching and learning. Alan Kay is still working on innovation personal computing through his work with One Laptop Per Child, and, at the launch of the first iPhone, famously told Steve Jobs that if he increased the screen size to at least 5" by 8", he would rule the world (Kay, 2010).

Before the iPad began to rule the world and its libraries, though, a number of other devices played a role in the evolution of the tablet computer, as we know it today. As far back as 1983, Apple was imagining an iPad-like device; while it never made it out of the prototyping phase, the Apple Bashful was a tablet that included an attachable keyboard, stylus, and floppy disk drive (Golijan, 2010). The first touch screen tablet device that actually made it onto the market and into consumers hands was the GRiDPad. Debuting in 1989, the GRiDPad was relatively expensive, targeted at specialists, such as professionals in medicine and law enforcement, and never became popularized with the general public (Atkinson, 2008). Following the GRiDPad, personal digital assistants, like the Apple Newton and then the PalmPilot, introduced a new generation of mobile computing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While these devices were showing consumers how access to information through a portable device could be helpful, Microsoft was developing a full-fledged tablet PC. The Microsoft Tablet PC was announced in 2001, and offered touch screen capabilities along with a fully functioning keyboard an even a mouse in many cases. With a standard 12-inch screen, the Microsoft Tablet PC was portable, but not exceedingly so. The Microsoft Tablet PC is still on the market, though it never became popular among general consumers.

When Steve Jobs announced the first generation iPad in March 2010, though, tablet computers were really welcomed into the mainstream. The iPad represents the tablet, as we think of it today: a sleek, lightweight device with Internet capability and uses apps to perform specific activities dictated by the user. While there may be many reasons for the iPads spectacular success, Tim Cook, Apple CEO, attributes the iPads unprecedented growth to the way that it grew organically out of everything that came before (Brownlee, 2012, para. 4). The iTunes Store and the App Store were already in place, and many people were already familiar with smartphones touch screens and capabilities (Brownlee, 2012). Furthermore, since the introduction of the first iPad and the dozens of Android-based tablets that followed the iPad, networks for supporting the growth of mobile devices have been keeping pace with the popularity of the devices. Mobile networks are currently accessible to more than 90% of the worlds populations; by 2017, more than one billion people worldwide are expected to access the Internet by their mobile devices (Oller, 2012). All these factorsinfrastructure, price, hardware, and consumer readinesshave converged to officially usher in the post-PC era.