I'm sure that many of us remember the mantra of Bill Clinton's campaign workers back when they were running Clinton for president: It's the Economy, Stupid. I was thinking of this when I read the 2007 Horizon Report. This report succinctly predicts technology trends over the next five years that will affect higher education.

The conclusions:

• One year or less: user-created content
• One year of less: social networking
• Two to three years: mobile phones
• Two to three years: virtual worlds
• Four to five years: new scholarship
• Four to five years: massively multiplayer educational gaming

I was especially happy to see the item about new scholarship. But the mobile phones item caught my eye because I've been frustrated over the past few years by the fact that libraries haven't put much effort into optimizing their services for mobile devices, be they phones or anything else. My own library hasn't been much inclined to take this on for our Web site, despite my proposal to focus on this need.

I was struck by this passage in the report: "The ability of almost all phones to access email, instant messaging, the web, and calendaring increases the ways in which students and instructors can communicate—and is eroding the digital divide." Just take a walk around campus and observe the cell phones in use, and you can see the potential truth in this statement.

I think libraries need to look at serving mobile users in at least two ways.

SMS reference. The library at Curtin University of Technology is one good example of an institution that offers text messaging - Short Message Service (SMS) - for receiving and answering reference questions. If users trend away from instant messaging and toward phone-based text messaging, we need to be ready for them.

You may wonder why someone would use text messaging when she could simply use her phone to call the reference desk instead. In fact, the latter would probably not even entail a fee. This strikes me as a logical but moot point. It's like asking why users sitting at workstations ten feet from the reference desk choose to use the library's IM reference service rather than get up and go to the desk. Users make choices because they have choices to make. This is the name of the game. For us to ask what is logical in our eyes is to ask useless questions. Instead, we need to be asking how we can serve those users who make these choices.

Optimizing our Web sites for mobile devices. I think that every library should include mobile access in its next Web site redesign. This might include something as simple as style sheets for mobile devices to more sophisticated programming. NYU's Bobst Library has been at it for a while with The Arch.

We ignore this opportunity at our peril. We're already worried about decreasing use of our Web sites as students look elsewhere to do their research. We may have well-thought-out plans for establishing ourselves on external sites where our users congregate, but this in no way eliminates the need for, and usefulness of, library Web sites - if we make them responsive to the needs of our users. And users may be more interested in our content if we make it available on the devices that they use.

It may be true that most of our users these days use their cell phones mainly as, well, phones - to make and receive calls. I don't have any data on this, but observation tells me that this is the case. But I also know that the use of phones to access the Web, and to send and receive text messages, is on the rise.

I'd sure love to see scholarly publishers optimize their Web sites for mobile computing. We should lobby them.

It's the mobility, stupid.