eBooks Study Day

I was asked to speak at the National eBooks Study Day at Christie Hospital in Manchester last month. I was slightly surprised to be asked, since I don't think I'm any kind of expert in this area, and I did try to foist the "opportunity" onto my colleague Andrew! But I ended up doing it anyway, and found the whole day to be really interesting.

We recently purchased iPads using money generated by hosting external events, and we've been looking at ways to use them in our Clinical Librarian work, and in the wider library setting. With eBooks however, it's quite tricky, since Apple don't allow DRM software on the iPad or iPhone. In my talk, I looked at the issues with using iPads and eBook readers from the point of view of a Clinical Librarian. I had to be honest, my main issue is that I rarely use books at all, whether they're electronic or print. Ideally, what I want to access is clinical summary databases for quick & dirty answers in a clinical meeting or on a ward round, I don't want to be logging in to an eBook provider and searching within individual books. My research reminded me that we did some work on PDA devices some years ago that allowed for localisation of the resources and searching across the information loaded onto them, which were very helpful.

I must admit I'm yet to fully get to grips with everything on offer through the iPad, and to make real use of it on the wards, but there is a huge amount of potential out there and doing it is the only way I will learn. I'd be interested to know what, if any, apps other CLs are using, and if you are making use of eBooks in your work.