Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted.
In that time, we've launched CISTI Mobile in production. In general, the creation was a positive experience. We learned plenty about JQuery mobile, Metalib API's (used to enable the federated search), and about mobile website development generally.
I think, correct me if I'm wrong, that is was indeed the first Canadian federal library mobile website?
Having accomplished the first goal of providing for a mobile interface for CISTI, we'd now like to pursue the further goal of having people actively use it. We've a few daily users.. but there's plenty of room for more usage.
I'd been thinking of redirecting mobile users from our various applications to the mobile site - but now I realize that that's kind of complicated. The simplest solutions to implement wouldn't place them on their equivalent landing page, and thus would likely cause confusion. It seems that this is one of the key disadvantages to having a "separate" mobile site, rather than skinning existing applications to serve mobile users natively.
That said, the effort to skin all of our applications would have been enormous. Hence, I think I'll see if we can't simply direct users to the common landing pages/static pages to the mobile site - and leave the rest for now.
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