pop quiz: what is SMS?

This evening, I was approached with an interesting reference question. The patron asked, “How can I send an SMS to a mobile phone in Norway?”

Consider yourself warned: As SMS increases in popularity in the United States (it has already become fully integrated into the continents of Europe, Asia, and Australia) our patrons will have questions about it. There are statistics about SMS in the US which tell us use is on the increase, but that’s not how I know more people are using it. How do I know then? I nearly fainted when I recieved a text message from my mother one day out of the blue (even if it said something like “gdjjm”” – i don’t think she quite knew how to press the buttons to change letters).

If you want to get up to speed, or have some staff that need to learn about this here is a decent Introduction to SMS.

Previos posts on walking paper about SMS

Bonus SMS Links

Comments

4 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.
  1. Stephen,

    And you may also wish to look at http://library.curtin.edu.au/ to see an example of RefSMS

  2. Awww, come on! You gotta answer the question! How DO you send an SMS to someone in Norway? Let us non-sms users know… :-)

  3. Altarama now has a product to help libraries set up a SMS-based reference service.

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