I recently discovered that my place of work has an iPhone application, and I have been investigating library resources that have mobile interfaces to see what might work well as an addition to that application.
Apparently, Ebsco has had a mobile interface since last November, or so says this press release. I discovered this earlier today.
I’ve been playing around with it on my iPod Touch this evening, and I have to admit I’m disappointed.
I decided I’d try it out with Academic Search Premier, so I took my normal path to get to that database. I started at the library home page, clicked on Databases, then A, then Academic Search Premier, and logged into our proxy server.
My first disappointment is that Ebsco did not “realize” I was on a mobile device. I will try to be tactful here and simply say that I know of at least one major Ebsco competitor that has this “automatic detection” built in.
My second disappointment was all the steps I had to take just to search Academic Search Premier using the mobile interface. As mentioned above, I was not immediately taken to the mobile interface – I had to scroll down to the bottom of the page to see that link. I would not have known that link was there if I had not seen it earlier today in the “normal” Ebsco interface.
So, once I click on the link for the mobile interface, I’m asked to select databases. So, despite the fact that I came from Academic Search Premier, I have to indicate, again, that I want to search Academic Search Premier.
Finally, I find myself at the search screen. I’m non-plussed by the options I see there – the first option is to Choose Databases. Again. The second option is Search Options, which turns out to have all the helpful stuff. The third option is Field Codes, a phrase even I, expert user, didn’t catch the meaning of immediately. The fourth option is Preferences. After reviewing those preferences, I can’t imagine why I would ever want to change them.
At the bottom of the search screen there’s a link that takes you back to the top of the page. This is somewhat amusing to me. The EBSCO banner, the search box, the aforementioned options – they all fit on one screen (vertically, anyway – horizontally, not so much). The only thing of import I see when I scroll down…is the link back up to the top of the page.
Now, despite my disappointment at the search, I would like to say that I think the results of a search look nice, and the full text (when it exists) formats nicely on my iPod, at least if the full text is in PDF format. (HTML Full Text looks a little narrow on my iPod.)
Weirdly just listening to an EBSCO rep as I was checking my feeds and came across your post. I’ve tried using EBSCO on my iPhone and thankfully didn’t have so many problems getting to the mobile version – our institution has enabled it in the admin interface so that you can select mobile when you first enter database. Still agree it would be better if it automatically detected though!