Things 20 - 22: NBPLS apps

NB23 Week 9
I have been using the Overdrive app for many years now. I have tested it sporadically on different devices from a PC, to kobo, to smartphones and tablets. I currently have it downloaded on my Windows smartphone and Windows tablet.

I have not yet taken to pleasure reading on the screen. I will admit that the major reason for this is because I tend to want to multitask when I am looking at a screen, and I end up jumping around to different things, rather than remaining just focused on reading. I do, however use Overdrive on my phone (almost constantly) for audiobooks. If you call out to me in public and I don’t respond it is probably because I am walking along with ear buds in, listing to a great book.

I was so happy to find that Overdrive was available as a Windows app, because the major drawback for Windows mobile devices is the lack of selection in apps....

You: “Hey have you tried ***insert name of new app everyone is talking about***?”
Me: “Nope, it’s not available on Windows (at least not yet)”.

Case in point: the BiblioNB App. It is one of those apps for which a Windows version has not been developed. I have played around with the app on the iPad, however, and I am very impressed with all that it does. In fact, I think I prefer the app over the NBPLS website! My favourite part of helping coworkers with this thing is showing them how it can read an ISBN barcode - very cool!

In helping coworkers to do these app things, it was once again made evident that what we need to be learning from all of these “things” is a general comfort and aptitude for navigating the digital world and using internet-based tools (not necessarily how to do these specific things). It seems to me that there is a fundamental shift from the way tasks were done in the workplace of the past to the way tasks are done in the more fluid and changeable digital world. Many of my coworkers want step-by-step instructions; they want to be told, “click here” “click there”, and they expect it to be the same every time. We have tried to accommodate this expectation with, for example, the various deviceinfo sheets that the MPL reference team has created. However, updates and changes happen so frequently it could almost be a fulltime job to keep on top of updating the instructions! As we discovered when returning a book through the iPad Overdrive app, the instruction needed to be updated. The smart people at the MPL reference department knew, of course, that rather than updating these instructions, the more efficient solution is to remove these detailed instructions (users can rely on the app's help menu, if necessary).

I hope that one of the outcomes of the 23 things training is that, these workers will liberate themselves from step-by-step instructions, so that they are not stuck when the instructions are unavailable or out of date.