BrowZine iPad app

I shared a link to this discussion with John Seguin, President of Third Iron, and–not being able to reply to this thread–he replied to me:

Ahh… took another look and doesn’t look like I can reply to feedback on the blog post you made, so will just respond to you. 🙂

It would indeed be worthwhile to note that we are NOT trying to replicate search, but instead provide browsable access to titles currently lost in databases to provide a much more comfortable browsing and reading experience for users on the device that many of them have chosen, the iPad (though an Android tablet version is scheduled for release around January!)

Another important point to make is that we do not just provide a method to go in and see the TOC, but also track those titles put on the bookshelf and send push notifications when new issues are made available. So for the researcher wanting to keep up to date with what is happening in their research area, this provides a very streamlined experience so that they can: receive the notifications, browse the new TOC, access any articles of interest via the library’s subscription and then store that information in Zotero, Endnote, Refworks, Dropbox, etc for later reference when working on new papers.

Other iPad applications in more of the “consumer content” area realize the value in making publications easily browsable (such as Apple’s own Newsstand and Zinio). However, these solution, of course, do not cater to the academic due to the content provided as well as the lack of any bibliographic management integration. Plus, those services (even if they DID have academic content in them) would require individuals to purchase the content, while BrowZine leverages existing usage rights the library already pays for.

Another point of interest that libraries have told us they are interested in BrowZine for is one of outreach to faculty to help them discover additional content available to them. They know these devices are popping up everywhere while we continue to stress that our library’s are virtual (electronic) which of course, they are! BrowZine really brings that home by providing access to titles that a researcher may be unfamiliar with. As they drill down the taxonomy from:

Engineering & Technology -> Chemical Engineering -> (the shelf labeled) Petroleum Engineering

They may be very familiar with Energy & Fuels from the ACS but have no idea that the library also subscribes to the Journal of Fuel Chemistry and Technology from Elsevier

This sort of serendipitous discovery was common place when our libraries were mostly physical (find a physical book and discover those around it are similar) but has largely been lost when we rely on search as the starting point of all information gathering. We all know that academic libraries pay a huge sum of money for their subscribed content, and our hope is that BrowZine will help them get better use out of these subscriptions!

One additional thought is that entire issues of a journal can often be “themed” (my wife, an Electrical Engineering Professor at the University of Kansas had recently shown me a special issue regarding Aeronautics in IEEE’s Transactions on Electromagnetic Compatibility). If she had not received the print issue, she would never have known that and found other articles in that area (an area of research of hers!)

Anyhow, while we touch on this a little bit in the video, I’ll be writing up a blog post soon which will go into the “why browse?” in a similar way, but wanted to just pass this along as food for thought.

I welcome your comments!

Cheers,
John

–Allie

We will have a CUNY-wide trial (so we’ll be able to access the two OA collections as well as ScienceDirect & ACS) as soon as an update to the app is released. I’ll keep folks posted via this thread. –Allie

Version 1.0.1 of the app is now available so please update accordingly. I’ll have more information about a trial tomorrow (9/28). –Allie