Contact: Jamieson Chandler
Jamieson@textalibrarian.com
(415) 517-1707
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 27, 2009
American Library Association Goes Mobile with Mosio for Annual Conference
Mosio's Text a Librarian to Power Mobile Information Services for Attendees
San Francisco, CA — When the world's oldest and largest library association
meets the nation's biggest convention center, there is a lot of ground to cover.
This year, the American Library Association (ALA) is partnering with Mosio to
maximize attendee experience at its annual conference by offering mobile
information via text messaging.
An estimated 25,000 librarians and information professionals from across the
U.S. and abroad will attend the ALA Annual conference, the largest gathering in
the library industry. This year's event, held in July at the McCormick Place
Convention Center in Chicago, offers over 300 educational programs, 2,000
committee meetings and activities, and a massive convention center featuring
over 1,000 exhibitors. Attendees have a lot of conference information to digest
over a large space, including programming schedules, member services, exhibitor
locations, and what to do while in Chicago.
Over the course of the 7 day conference, 250 volunteer ALA Ambassadors will
utilize Mosio's Text a Librarian technology to respond to questions from
attendees wherever they are. The service, dubbed "Text an ALA Ambassador" for
the conference, enables attendees to text questions from their mobile phones and
ALA Ambassadors to answer via a web interface.
"We are excited to partner with Mosio on our first-ever mobile information
service," said John Chrastka, ALA's Director for Membership Development. "Adding
this mobile element to the helpful service that Ambassadors already provide will
benefit conference attendees, speakers and exhibitors to get the most out of
their show experience by being able to get all the information they need while
on the go."
Launched at ALA Midwinter conference in Denver, Mosio's Text a Librarian enables
libraries to easily implement SMS/Text Messaging to reference and patron
services. Patrons text questions to their libraries, and librarians respond by
typing answers on a private website. The service is now being used in a number
of public and academic libraries across the country.
"Offering Text a Librarian at ALA's biggest event of the year is a perfect use
of the technology," said Noel Chandler, Mosio CEO and Co-Founder. "We created
the service by asking librarians what would make an SMS reference solution easy
to implement and use, so having it available to everyone at the conference is
very exciting."
In addition to in-person support at information desks, ALA Ambassadors will
respond to text message inquiries during regular conference hours from Thursday,
July 9th through Tuesday, July 14th.
About Mosio's Text a Librarian
Accessible by over 250 million U.S. mobile phones, Text a Librarian is a mobile
reference service technology developed for libraries utilizing Mosio's award-
winning mobile questions and answers technology and consulting with reference &
patron services librarians to find out what would make it useful, accessible and
affordable for libraries to use. For more information regarding Text a
Librarian, please visit www.textalibrarian.com.
About ALA
The American Library Association is the oldest and largest library association
in the world, with more than 64,000 members. Its mission is to promote the
highest quality library and information services and public access to
information. ALA offers professional services and publications to members and
nonmembers. www.ala.org
