Using an iPad to Demo BHL

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On Saturday October 2nd and Sunday October 3rd, 2010, Smithsonian Institution Libraries staff members Polly Lasker and Gil Taylor, plus volunteer John Hejna (Polly’s husband), promoted the Libraries’ services at a booth during the annual Autumn Conservation Festival at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) near Front Royal, Virginia: http://nationalzoo.si.edu/ActivitiesAndEvents/Celebrations/ACF/default.cfm

The one BHL-scanned book we pre-loaded to an iPad and brought along was big hit with the crowd, “Curiosities of Entomology” http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/8174 . It was a revelation how well the iPad works for demoing BHL in a face-to-face setting, and the book we selected seemed to work very well with the app, iBooks (Polly and Gil, pictured above, demonstrating BHL book on iPad). Young people, in particular, intuitively knew how to navigate to view the book with the device. Needless to say, we distributed many BHL cards to the nearly 150 people who visited us that weekend.

For photos from the event, please see this Flickr link.

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Gil Taylor is the Assistant Department Head of the National Museum of Natural History Library at Smithsonian Libraries.

Polly Lasker is a Reference Librarian at the National Museum of Natural History Library at Smithsonian Libraries. Currently, she serves as the Vertebrate Zoology librarian, overseeing the Birds, Fishes, Mammals and Reptiles divisional libraries, as well as performing reference duties for the main Natural History Library.