Last week I launched @SutMobLib, a Twitter account that tweets the location of Sutton’s mobile library in real time. No, I’m not sitting here all day sending messages. A program does that automatically. Every time the library gets to a new stop it posts up its location.
Susan is a bookworm and regular library user. She filters the RSS feed of new acquisitions at her local library for the names of authors which she likes and reads it on her phone. One morning a new book by one of her favourite authors appears on the list. She reserves it with a single tap. At lunchtime she walks to the library and picks the book off the shelf. Susan scans the book’s RFID tag with her phone and with another tap she checks it out. (Anyone can check out or renew any item with an RFID-enabled phone but they must use the library’s own scanners to check things back in.) Her phone also shows two local events: the first for the library’s book club and the second for a reading by that author at a nearby bookshop in two months’ time. She adds the book reading to her calendar with a single tap. Two months later, Susan’s openly-licenced, tagged and geotagged photos of the author that she takes at the book signing appear automatically within minutes on the book club’s website, with a credit to her, a link back to her own profile page on the photo sharing website and a link to the author’s page on the local library’s website. Nearly all his books are out.