There’s a great new book out on mobile technologies in libraries and I was fortunate to have been asked to contribute a chapter on mobile learning and mobile instruction in libraries. The book is called The Handheld Library: Mobile Technology and the Librarian and it was edited by the undeniably awesome Tom Peters and Lori Bell who were into mobile tech for libraries way before mobile was hot.

My chapter is called “Mobile Learning: The Teacher in Your Pocket” and is available for free via PDXScholar, our institutional repository at Portland State. It covers mobile learning in libraries and in the classroom and I’m surprisingly proud of it (given that I usually hate everything I write).

The rest of the book is fantastic as well and the author lineup reads like a who’s who in library technologies: Robin Ashford, Lisa Carlucci Thomas, Chad Mairn, Chad Haefele, Lili Luo, Sue Polanka, Rebecca Miller and many more. The book includes a great mix of writing from academic, public, and health science librarians.

That I was able to post this to my digital repository as soon as the book came out is evidence that every author should advocate for themselves in negotiating contracts. The implicit message most publishers send when they give you a contract is that this is the contract, when, in so many cases, there is wiggle room or alternative options. With ABC-CLIO, I was originally given a contract that afforded me no rights to my work and afforded them the right to sell my work in whatever future products/content mashups they wanted. After stating that I would not sign a contract like that, they ended up giving me one where I still have copyright and can do what I want with the work outside of the book project. It’s always worth remembering that you’re contributing the most important part of the equation: the content. You could publish your content without them, but they are dead in the water without content. Don’t ever settle for less than you feel you deserve.