1. In library literacy sessions in classes. You could use one for each group of 4-5 students and ask students to complete a project on it. This would be particularly useful when presenting in a non-computer lab classroom.
2. You could go into the student commons or anywhere else where students or your library patrons hang out and ask if you can give them a brief demonstration on something such as how to locate ebooks, how to find articles in a certain database or how to search the library catalog.
3. You could have a limited number available for in library use only for a limited time period.
4. You could use them to teach a library mini-course in a group study room or other library room that does not have computers.
5. You could have one of the members of your library staff stand in a high traffic area away from your reference desk carrying an ipad and offer to help patrons as they wonder through the stacks.
6. You could load some ebooks on them and check them out since unlike the kindle this is probably allowed. Although you would need to have the patron sign their life away, in order to be able to use one.
7. You could consider having your staff use ipads instead of your regular computers. This may or may not work but if you could make it work, you may be able to say a lot of money.
8. Find some library related websites, ebooks or other content and upload them onto a few ipads and leave these out on your library displays for patrons to use inside the library.
9. Get rid of all or some of your library computers and replace them with ipads for your patrons to use instead.
10. Give away an ipad as a prize for a library contest. Make your patrons complete some kind of a survey to be entered to win.
[...] 10 Ways Your Library Could Use the Ipad [...]
im loving the ipad personally. what do you think of it now? was it upto your standards?
I actually don’t have one yet and I don’t know that I will get one. I was just theorizing about how it could be used.
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Hello, instead of having your staff carry around the iPad in high traffic areas, consider iPad stands that let you securely mount iPads to a counter or table. They could be placed on a movable stand as well. Either way it’s a lot better than having a monitor attached to a computer hidden in a cabinet. archelonenclosures.com
It’s iPad, not Ipad.
[...] Ten Ways Your Library Could Use the iPad [Social Networking for Libraries] http://socialnetworkinglibrarian.com/2010/02/24/10-ways-your-library-could-use-the-ipad/ [...]
Just to say that I don’t see iPads being able to replace computers in the library, at least not for a while. Students might want to use them to write short (one- or two-page) papers or memos or to take short online quizzes in an info lit class, but the keyboard is just not user friendly enough to want to use for long periods of time (well, at least if you’re past 30). In fact, my fingers start cramping when I use it for more than a few minutes at a time. I have invested in a different keyboard for it, which does help to some extent, but it still is not nearly as good as a laptop keyboard. So, long story short, I don’t see the iPad as being something students would want to use to write a major research project or to create a presentation that’s more than a few slides long.
An issue that I haven’t been able to figure out so far is how to connect the iPad with a printer. I suppose it will end up being a matter of the library having to purchase new i-Pad-compatible computers if we were to try to go that route.
So far, the most valuable academic use I’ve found for iPad is the ability to download journal articles in PDF which are then remain available to read when the student is away from her laptop or desktop computer or when she doesn’t have Internet access. Then, of course, there is also the potential to use iPads to read library-provided e-books in any number of formats.
For me personally, the real advantage of iPad is the fact that it is smaller than a laptop and therefore so much easier to carry around. I’m much more likely to want to take my iPad on a plane trip than I was to take my laptop.