Library Applications for iPad

Top 25 Library Apps for the iPad

When's the last time you thought, "Gee, I really miss scrolling around with a nice microfiche?" Between those and the Dewey decimal system, who's got the time to mess with libraries anymore? Well, who else but college kids, that is. The college library will always be an indispensible feature of higher education, providing the study materials students need and the place to peruse them. But the future is digital, and iPads are a great way to bridge the gap between traditional libraries and the developing world of e-reading. Here are the 25 best library apps to invest in.

1. My Library For $4, your iPad becomes the memory center for your personal book, CD, and movie libraries. Catalog your books by scanning the ISBN with your iPad camera, track who you loaned books to, and get access to free eBooks.
   
   
   
2. Book Crawler Book Crawler takes book cataloging to new heights with cool features like reviews and local library availability when you scan the barcode, Dropbox support for backing up your info, and location awareness to see what others around you are reading and strike up online (or real-world) discussions.
   
   
   
3. Library Books If you're forgetful, this $3 app will pay for itself pretty quickly. It can track multiple library cards and let you know when you've got a book coming due. (Check to make sure your library is covered before purchasing.)
   
   
   
4. OverDrive Media Console This free app gives you access to more than 18,000 libraries worldwide and lets you "check out" audiobooks and eBooks with a valid card. The titles expire on their own, so you don't have to sweat late fees.
   
   
   
5. GoodReader for iPad Mashable called this the "Swiss army knife of awesome." It's got quick, smooth handling of huge PDF and text files and even lets you make notes on PDFs. You can also wirelessly sync between folders and devices and annotate with a slew of editing tools.
   
   
   
6. MeeGenius! Kid's Books Bring a children's library to you with this free app featuring more than 300 titles. Turn your kids into little geniuses with the read-along technology that highlights and narrates words to help them learn.
   
   
   
7. BookBuddy Lite This app lets you share your book library over social media like Facebook and Twitter. You can also create custom categories for organizing your titles. And best of all, it's free.
   
   
   
8. iBooks You knew there'd be an iBooks. This one lets you bookmark and take notes, find free samples of any book in the iBookstore before buying, and sync your books and PDFs to your other iOS devices.
   
   
   
9. Kindle Some people actually prefer using Amazon's Kindle app for reading eBooks to Apple readers. It's a simple way to access the more than 1 million titles the online retailer has for sale, plus more than 400 magazines and newspapers. Change your background color, font, font size, and more to customize your reading experience.
   
   
   
10. Stanza This long-time favorite of iPhone users is now on the iPad. It's a free app that lets you peruse 50,000 titles from partner stores and 50,000 more free classics available thanks to Project Gutenberg, then store and categorize them once you've got them.
    
    
    
11. ICDL- Free Books For Children Give your kids a taste of literature from around the world with the International Children's Digital Library app. There are free books from 60-plus countries with beautiful illustrations and English story summaries and titles from as far back as the 1800s.
    
    
    
12. iResearch For the next best thing to researching in the library, try this no-cost app from the American Institute of Physics. You'll get access to scholarly journals like Journal of Applied Physics and Applied Physics Letters, whose articles you can then download with a personal subscription or a school access subscription, if your school has one.
    
    
13. Kobo Kobo is a free app that's packed with fun features, like the ability to share passages with friends and see what books they recommend. Kobo also lets you add books, both pay and free, to your library from email, Dropbox, or the web, and the reading experience is highly customizable.
    
    
    
14. NYPL Biblion: World's Fair This is the first app in a series that will be released by the New York Public Library to bring their famous research collections to a wide audience. You'll find amazing documents, pictures, audio, and videos from the 1939-1940 World's Fair.
    
    
    
15. arXiv Study like a Cornell student with the help of this reference app. The school's database hosts more than 500,000 PDFs of texts in the fields of math, science, physics, biology, and others that you can search by category. It's like Microfiche 2.0.
    
    
    
16. iSSRN From the Social Sciences Research Network, this is a great reference tool for social sciences and humanities students. More than 260,000 research papers are at your fingertips for viewing or emailing with this free app.
    
    
    
17. Mobile Abstracts PubMed is a database operated by the National Library of Medicine and hosts more than 20 million medical journal abstracts. With this $.99 app you can search and view abstracts as PDFs for research. It'll save your searches for you and let you bookmark articles you want to keep.
    
    
    
18. Free Books The name's a bit misleading, as the app costs $1.99. But once you fork that over you've got exactly 23,469 free books waiting to be downloaded to your iPad. There are no limits and no download caps.
    
    
    
19. Local Books Book lovers from librarything.com love this app that's like Urban Spoon for books. It guides you to nearby libraries, bookstores, and upcoming literary events, but the fun part is socializing with other bibliophiles.
    
    
    
20. ACS Mobile The American Chemical Society was nice enough to create this free app so that any interested students can have up-to-the-minute updates on scholarly articles published across a range of industry journals. Currently the database is at 850,000 articles and counting.
    
    
21. British Library 19th Century Collection Similar to the NYPL collections app, this program delivers fascinating looks at books, engraved illustrations and maps, and other historic pieces from the 1800s. The app is free, and for a small monthly subscription you'll have access to more than 60,000 titles.
    
    
22. WorldCat Mobile MapQuest meets iBooks with this app that will let you search local libraries for a particular title and then map you out the fastest route to the library with that book in stock.
    
    
    
23. DCPL This is the library app that started it all. The District of Columbia Public Library system made the source code for their app available to other libraries to make their own apps. If you live in the area of a library using this type of app, you can find nearby libraries, make and modify orders, and find reviews and recommendations for popular books.
    
    
24. IOPscience Express This gratis app from IOP Publishing (Institute of Physics) allows you to download up to 20 recently-published scholarly papers each month. Easily search by author name, journal name, or topic and find the data you need to make your report perfect.
    
    
    
    
25. AccessMyLibrary For those occasions you need a library but it's after hours, try this app. AML uses your location to find libraries nearby and then allows you access to those libraries' online resources.
    

How will MOOCs impact the future of college education?

Massive Open Online Courses are leveraging today’s technology to provide (typically) free access to world class education.

Only the proverbial ostrich (you know, the one with it’s head in the sand) could look at the growing popularity of MOOCs and not acknowledge that technology has the potential to radically transform how education is delivered and the way that we learn. While change is not always a good thing, courses that are convenient and accessible across the world, and are often free, surely have a lot of good things going for them.

“MOOC” stands for Massive Open Online Course, and the number of institutions offering MOOCs is growing quickly. Thanks to increasing media attention and expanding offerings, interest in MOOCs has taken a significant leap forward in the last year (further attested to in this Google Search Insights graph).

Wikipedia’s entry for MOOCs explains that, “MOOCs are founded on the theory of connectivism and an open pedagogy based on networked learning. Typically, participation in a MOOC is free; however, some MOOCs may charge a fee in the form of tuition if the participant seeks some form of accreditation.”

According to Educause’s “7 Things You Should Know About MOOCs”, the first MOOC is widely thought to be a course titled “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge,” which was co-taught by George Siemens and Stephen Downes at the University of Manitoba, delivered to 25 tuition-paying students but offered at the same time to around 2,300 students from the general public who took the online class at no cost.
A sampling of the current state of the MOOC
Today’s MOOC offerings are expanding rapidly in terms of academic subjects covered, numbers of institutions offering them, and students partaking in them. To provide a sense of the widely varied approaches that are being taken with the creation and delivery of MOOCs, here’s a sampling of start-ups, major players, and a few popular individual courses:

• Udemy: Making no bones about it, the ‘About’ blurb on the home page of the Udemy site states, “Our goal is to disrupt and democratize education by enabling anyone to learn from the world’s experts.” They have hundreds of thousands of students taking courses from their selection of hundred of classes courses covering a vast array of subjects. They have both paid and free courses, and these include courses from many different universities.
  
• Coursera: This growing powerhouse in the world of MOOCs, Coursera currently hosts courses from Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and University of Pennsylvania. They offer dozens of courses, covering subjects from “A History of the World” to “Vaccines”. These courses are non-credit, but many colleges are starting to consider the possibility of offering credit for satisfactory completion of MOOC courses.
• Udacity: As of the writing of this article, recent start-up Udacity is offering only a handful of course, all in the computer sciences field. Founded by three roboticists who believed that much of the educational value of their university classes could be offered online, over 160,000 students enrolled in their first offering, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” Pretty impressive.
• Creativity & Multicultural Communication from SUNY Empire State College: This course was offered as both a MOOC and a for-credit course at the same time. The course was a ‘connectivist’ course that mixed a variety of activities to facilitate learning and encouraged the use of selections from a wide variety of web-based tools for making a record of learning activities as students consume, remix and repurpose content (learn more on this ‘how it works‘ page).
• Change.mooc.ca: This course is just wrapping up, and has leveraged a mix of over 30 innovative thinkers, researchers, and scholars from the field of instructional technology, from 11 different countries. Each week, one of these professors or researchers introduces his or her central contribution to the field.

What does the future hold?
It’s going to be interesting to see how the MOOC movement, along with open course initiatives like MIT’s OpenCourseWare, evolve in the coming years, and how these developments relate to traditional higher education. If even a small number of universities and colleges start offering or accepting credits for these types of courses, it could easily grow into a larger trend, and  lower the overall cost of completing a degree. Could this reshape how students earn college credit? Is this ultimately a harbinger of free higher education, or will it evolve into something else entirely? What do you think?