Make That to Go: Re-Engineering a Web Portal for Mobile Access

The fact that people now live in a world of abundant portable electronic devices is important to any organization that maintains a web presence, including libraries. No longer tied to a desktop, the patrons' netbooks, tablets, ebook readers, and, of course, cellphones all become potential tools for remote access to library content. About a year ago, while working on a major revision to a library's electronic resource web portal, the author began a small skunkworks project to see what it would take to make this application mobile-friendly. The process of designing and coding a mobile site as it was implemented at the James A. Zimble Learning Resource Center, at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) is presented from the author's perspective as a librarian and a software developer. This article describes how the author re-engineered the library's web portal for mobile access.