DC Public Library launches iPhone app for their catalog

Aaron Schmidt blogs that the DC Public Library iPhone app is now available for download.  So I downloaded it and gave it a quick run through.  No bells and whistles, but it gets the job done.  Seems to only allow keyword searching at the moment – can't search by author, etc.  You can place holds though, which is great.  I would love to have something like this for the Calgary Public Library, and hope to take a stab at developing something similar over the summer for the UofC.

Nice work Aaron! (and way to sneak the bike onto the labs page). 

Here's a series of screenshots showing what's available.  I wonder if the interface sets a limit on searches though, as when I went back in to grab a shot of the holds page I kept getting a "no results" message even on searches I had previously run.



Near as I can tell from the iTunes store, this is the first library application available.  Oh, and now I see Aaron's confirmed that on his personal blog as well.


Comments

3 Responses to “DC Public Library launches iPhone app for their catalog”

  1. chris_t Avatar
    chris_t

    Actually you can search by author (try searching for Richard russo, jk rowling, etc).

  2. Fair enough, though it’s still a keyword search. Not complaining! 🙂 Chris, should I be giving you explicit props in the above post?

  3. Very handy!
    While not iPhone specific, we have just developed a mobile app to search our colleges’ catalogs. You can search by keyword, author, title – pretty much anything. Take a look: mobile.linccweb.org. Full description (along with some other cool stuff) here: http://www.linccweb.org/tools/