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This research documents the progress academic libraries at high-level research universities are making toward becoming truly mobile research libraries. Trying to chart the progress of mobile services in university libraries is a difficult but necessary task. As with all academic work, there is value in documenting trends, especially so when the change is as rapid as the move to mobile computing has been. Studies that document progress become more important over time and can benefit creators as they attempt to build new systems (Aldrich, 2010). However, with these rapid changes in mobile technology, documentation can be problematic as updates can change apps and mobile web sites on a daily, if not hourly, basis.
Previous researchers have documented the increasing use of mobile technology by students (Bomhold, 2013; Johnson et al. , 2011, 2013; Paterson and Low, 2011; Dahlstrom et al. , 2011; Smith et al. , 2009; Zhang, 2008). Smartphone ownership by young adults age 18-24 was 79 percent in the first half of 2013, and was even higher (81 percent) for 25-34 year olds, up from 35 percent of all adults just two years earlier (Smith, 2013). Additionally, the majority of undergraduates believe that their institution's library web site is very/extremely important to school success, and nearly 60 percent said they would use a smartphone to look up academic information or to access digital resources (Dahlstrom et al. , 2013). But are academic libraries keeping up with this rapid change? A study of 73 academic libraries at Carnegie rated very high research (RU/VH) universities found that almost 30 percent still had no mobile access in 2013 (Bomhold, 2014). This paper expands on that research by investigating the discovery functions that are provided on mobile devices at 53 universities rated RU/VH by the Carnegie Foundation.
Research and discovery services in library and information science
The phrase web scale discovery has been used in the profession when referring to programs that provide users one search box to retrieve results from many, or all of a library's content providers, such as the catalog, databases, and electronic journals. For the purpose of this investigation, the term discovery refers to those functions that the user interacts with, and which change the user's situation. There is precedent for this...