SCONUL Focus 57 2013 33 Mobile library services for distance learning students Keren Mills Digital Services Development Officer The Open University Library Walton Hall Milton Keynes k.mills@open.ac.uk INTRODUCTION Library Services at the Open University (OU) has been offering mobile library services to our large body of users for over five years and these ser- vices continue to evolve. As the OU is a distance- learning institution, from the library perspective the emphasis is on providing flexible user-friendly access to online resources. The OU has approximately 260 000 students and about 70% of them remain in work while they are studying 1 . Their access to library resources is entirely online so scalability and ease of use are vital for our online services. This article will look at the services for mobile devices that have been established over the last five years and will discuss our current develop- ments, how they fit into university strategy and what we are planning for the near future. BACKGROUND Around 2006, colleagues in the OU’s central IT department observed that a small but significant number of visits to the student portal (called Stud- entHome) were from mobile phones; they started to track whether numbers were rising (see Fig. 1). Other colleagues in the university had already begun to consider the potential opportunities afforded by mobile learning, and it was generally considered that mobile phone ownership and mobile internet use were likely to increase. In order to be prepared for the anticipated increase in demand for mobile access to university web- sites, a ‘mobile learner support project manager’ was appointed within the university’s VLE devel- opment team and the Institute of Educational