Why Can’t I Use the Internet Browser on My Cell Phone/PDA to Access the Library Web Site and the Online Resources?

This is going to become a common question we receive from our faculty and students who have purchased a cell phone/PDA (iPhone, AT&T Tilt…) with unlimited data transfer packages. As they learn to use the internet browsers on their handheld, they will want to access our library resources online instead of having to download and install individual software medical references on the handheld.  The same desire might come from people using the 802.11 wireless features on the PDA.

There is no short and sweet answer to this issue, so I will attempt to explain it without a whole lot of jargon.  There are a number of factors that currently impede using these resources on the PDA using an internet browser like Internet Explorer or Safari.

1.       The design of these web sites.  Web pages are designed to be used on computers with large monitors and on computers with a lot of plug-ins like Flash and Java Scripts.  There are a few resources that have recognized that people are accessing their sites with PDAs and have a system in place that checks the type of device accessing the site and redirects to a web page formatted to be viewed on the small screen if the device is a PDA.  Examples:  Google’s normal site http://www.google.com compared to their PDA site which comes up on my cell phone http://www.google.com/pda.  Another is the Weather Channel’s http://www.weather.com versus their PDA site http://cingular.xhtml.weather.com/xhtml/cc/32301 . 

a.       The Library Web Site.  We have not formatted our library web page to work on a PDA or small screen.  Neither do we yet have the resources to detect the type of device accessing the site and redirect it to a PDA formatted library web page, even if we had one.  Therefore, the links that use Java scripts to call up sites do not work on the PDA.  You can click on one of the pages like Drug Resources and follow the hard links from that page.

b.       The resources web sites.  As far as I know, none of our library subscription web resources have developed web sites that work on the PDA.  Epocrates is in the development phase for a site that will work on an iPhone, but it may not be functioning yet, nor is it clear that this access will be a part of our negotiated library subscription. You might have to pay more to use it.  I tried it on my computer and it did not work. It would not pull up drug information. The URL is http://m.epocrates.com/iphone They are also developing a product that runs on the iPhone that will need to be downloaded and installed like our other PDA resources.

2.       IP authentication of subscription resources for access without passwords.  If you are not in one of our college of medicine buildings, logged in to our CoM network, you must use EZProxy to fool the resources into thinking you are on campus to get into all of our subscription Library resources.  This is very clunky on a PDA.  First of all, the link to the form where you sign in does not work on the PDA.  You must manually type in https://ezproxy.med.fsu.edu/login to get to this page.  Then you can get into the subscription resources, using links from the library site, but you can’t use them because they don’t fit on the screen, and have too many fancy programs running in the background to work on the PDA.

 

My recommendation for the immediate future is to try to use a regular PDA like the HP iPAQ or a Windows Mobile (AT&T Tilt) or Palm (Palm Treo) cell phone/PDA and download and install the resources linked on our web page http://www.med.fsu.edu/library/PDADocuments.asp.  We will let you know if any of our resources becomes available in handheld device formatted web sites that can be viewed in the handheld internet browser.  iPhone lovers, keep your fingers crossed that Apple’s release of the iPhone source code to developers of handheld software results in the availability of iPhone versions of your favorites.  Epocrates is going to start that movement.

Nancy Clark

Director of Medical Informatics Education

nancy.clark@med.fsu.edu