A year and half ago we launched the first edition of a Choice mobile app, our test, if you will, of the applicability of Choice data on the small screen. Our goals were simple: to understand user experience better, to create a platform on which we can experiment with new types of content, and most of all, to signal our eagerness to learn from our subscribers and to grow with them. By these standards the application was a success. The popularity of the bibliographic essays, for instance, was a critical factor in our decision to "promote" the essays to the LibGuides platform, and your attention to the community college editorials proved a strong endorsement of their value.
What else did we learn? We learned that you do not use the application to choose books for your library! (Actually, we never truly believed that you would...) Rather, it has been Choice’s so-called front matter that dominates reader selections and time on the app.
Then over this past summer two things happened. First, we launched a rebuilt version of Choice Reviews in a responsive-design format. With our reviews now available on a mobile platform specifically designed to support them, the need to include reviews in the mobile app became, well, negligible. About the same time we learned that Adobe was withdrawing support for the technology we used to publish the app. This development, too, had a marvelously clarifying effect on our thinking.
Beginning this month you now have available to you a completely reconceived mobile application, this one done in partnership with our colleagues in Chicago. What the new app is not is a scaled-down replica of Choice magazine. Other than reviews featured in our newsletters (“Hot Topics,” for example), the app does not include reviews. Instead, it is an interactive sampling of content from both Choice and ACRL publications presented in a single, continuously updated format.
The new ACRL-Choice mobile app brings to our traditional readers more of what they sought in the first edition: “Editors’ Top 75 Community College Resources,” the forthcoming titles essays, “Ask an Archivist,” links to the bibliographic essays, and other articles and features. But it also caters to a new audience, the larger membership of ACRL as a whole, with their more diverse interests and needs. With selected content from ACRL Insider, ACRL Log, and Keeping up With..., the app is now a place to visit to stay up-to-date on trends in academic librarianship and higher education, from collection development to cybersecurity to open peer review to information literacy.
The ACRL-Choice app is an open-access publication, free to everyone simply by downloading the application from Google Play (Android) or the Apple App Store (iOS). (Users of the current Choice app have been automatically upgraded to the new version.) So now it’s up to you. Please share your reactions to our new app by contacting me at tellchoice@ala-choice.org. Tell us what you like, what you don’t like, and, especially, how you are using it. Any feedback will be gratefully received.—MC
