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The purpose of this paper is to assess how Canadian academic libraries have responded to the rapidly evolving mobile environment and to identify gaps in the services provided, while suggesting areas for future development.

The paper conducted an examination of the mobile content and services provided by the libraries of the member institutions of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC). Based on this examination, the paper describes the current state of mobile librarianship in Canadian academic libraries. A review of the literature places the investigation in its broader context.

Only 14 percent of AUCC libraries currently advertise some type of mobile web presence, with mobile web sites being prevalent over downloadable apps. Examples of content and services are highlighted to illustrate current trends and to provide insight into future directions for developing mobile services.

This study raises awareness of the importance of mobile technology for academic libraries and the need to address the lack of mobile content and services provided by most Canadian post‐secondary institutions. The paper also identifies best practices exhibited by the surveyed libraries.

This is the first exploration of this type into how academic libraries in Canada have responded to the mobile environment. The value of this research is in helping libraries identify and address shortcomings in the mobile content and services they provide, and in highlighting efforts by libraries to address their users' needs in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the response of Canadian academic libraries to the rapid proliferation of mobile application (apps), many of which are useful for research, teaching, and learning.

A survey was conducted to identify existing initiatives that address the use of mobile apps to facilitate research, teaching, and learning at the libraries of the 97 member institutions of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC). Based on this survey, this paper describes how apps are promoted, curated, organized, and described by today’s academic libraries. A review of the literature places this survey in its broader context.

In total, 37 per cent of AUCC member libraries include links to mobile apps in their web site. Larger, research-intensive universities, tend to leverage apps more frequently than smaller institutions. Examples of how academic libraries are promoting apps provide insight into how academic librarians are responding to the proliferation of mobile technology.

The results of this survey highlight trends with regard to this emerging service opportunity, help to establish current best practices in the response of academic libraries to the emergence of mobile apps, and identify areas for potential future development.

This is the first study of its kind to explore and describe how third-party apps are used and promoted within an academic library context.

There has been little research about incident management decision making within real-life, dynamic emergencies such as urban fire settings. So this research addresses the research problem: how do incident managers make decisions in urban fire settings? These decision behaviours cover five areas: assessment of the fireground situation, selection of a decision strategy, determination of incident objectives, deployment and management of firefighting resources and ongoing review of the incident. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Case research was used to examine management of different types of fires, through in-depth interviews with a range of incident managers.

This research identified five key behavioural elements associated with incident management in urban fire settings such as their application of a mix of recognition-primed, value based, procedural and formal decision strategies throughout the course of an incident rather than a single style.

The in-depth framework of decision making could provide foundations for later research about other emergency settings. And this research is limited to analytic generalisation (Yin, 2009); so quantitative research such as surveys and large scale interviews could be done to further extend the research for statistical generalisation.

The decision procedures uncovered in this research will assist incident managers in many emergencies, assist policy making and foster the development of future incident managers.

The findings expand the knowledge of how incident managers develop situation awareness, make decisions and plans, implement them, and review the incident as it evolves. Another contribution is the comprehensive framework of decision making developed from these findings.

The author developed a specialized app to cater to the needs of researchers in business and economics. At the same time the number of library apps in general increased dramatically. This article intends to put the author's efforts in developing a specialized app into the context of the development of mobile apps for library users in general.

This paper reviews a number of seminal papers on the development of library apps and sets the description of the development of the EconBiz app against the developments in general. Users' needs in relation to library apps seem mostly pretty basic, yet some of these needs are still hard to meet.

The use of mobile phones, the services available on mobile devices and the availability of library apps are changing rapidly, so some findings might be outdated by the time the respective papers were published.

This paper brings together the findings of a number of studies and surveys against the practical implications of developing an individual app.