If your campus library provided access to iPads for students, what would your ideal setup, use and function be?

Dear Zachary,

We are a new medical school in Orlando FL. For the past two years our health sciences library has provided ipads for checkout. The medical students have been given iapds to use for study and patient care. As have all the teaching faculty members. The library subscribes to apps that are to be used on the ipads. These apps are Epocrates, Dynamed, PEPID and Geriatrics at Your Fingertips. We have also loaded "smart-textbooks" from a new company called Inkling for our medical students. (Smart textbooks engage multiple senses for learning interactions like touch, sound, and sight).  These smart textbooks are the medical students's required textbooks which have been selected by the core faculty. We expect students to use the ipads for patient care as well as for study and classroom exams. The library is the center of tablet deployment for the college of medicine and is responsible for maintaining and trouble shooting any patron questions or issues while using the ipads. It is expected that these devices will be used in all 4 years of students medical school education. In order to make the Wi-Fi enabled ipads work seamlessly we worked closely with our IT department to beef up the Wi-Fi environment at our school. This did require some financial investment into the wireless setting.

When ipads are returned by patrons (3 week checkout) it is very easy to wipe the device and restore it to its factory settings. This process usually only takes about 1 minute or less. Very very easy to maintain.