Space Oddity: Mobile Devices, Content & Australian Academic Libraries

Abstract

While the mobile environment has made it possible for academic content to be accessed at the point of need, this paper ponders what value scholars place on the content available via the mobile web. Through an in-depth, qualitative survey of academics from the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, Faculty of Arts and Social Science and the University’s Australian School of Business this paper aims to understand how academics are currently engaging with e-content in both teaching and research and how this has been altered by the mobile environment. The potential benefits and pitfalls for academic use of mobile content, the adaptations in information seeking behaviour necessary for academics to meet the changing technological demands, and the implications for collection development and content delivery in academic libraries is discussed.