Catalogue-based Interaction and Access to Library Resources

The role of libraries in supporting learning is virtually unquestionable. Research indicates that much learning in life is often in informal settings. It is interesting to note that mobile computing affords a great opportunity for supporting such learning. Not only are we living in a "mobile age" or "ubiquitous age", but we are also living in a "digital age". Even as we acknowledge the window of opportunity that mobile computing affords to libraries, it would also be interesting to consider how mobile computing can help us to exploit context as far as digital libraries are concerned. We have been exploring various non-conventional paradigms for accessing and interacting with digital libraries besides the common "search" and "search-refinement" mechanisms. In this paper we describe our work on one of the nonconventional paradigms, catalogue browsing, toward exploiting context in digital libraries through mobile computing.