Appreciating our local universities? There's an app for that. The iPhone has become so popular and so widespread that applications are popping up for all kinds of things, including accessing collections for universities and getting a sightseeing guide for walking around campus.

Duke University Libraries has DukeMobile 1.1, which in addition to offering information about Duke courses, events, and sports, also puts a library in your pocket! The application offers about 32,000 images from 20 collections which cover a variety of topics, including women's history, Duke history, and even sheet music.

You can see a really nifty video demonstration at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHK3E4N7w6o with a link to the application itself and more details at http://library.duke.edu/blogs/digital-collections/2009/06/16/library-digital-collections-theres-an-app-for-that/. It's free.

It hasn't been released yet, but I'm also excited about another application, WolfWalk, from NCSU. WolfWalk, which has a project page at http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/dli/projects/wolfwalk/, is described a "A pilot project to create a mobile application that enables users to explore NC State campus history using a location-aware map-based interface."

The program has about 60 campus locations mapped to it, with historical photos associated with each location. Intially the program will be developed for the iPhone, but later versions will be developed for non-iPhone devices. The target date for WolfWalk is this fall.

There isn't a real demo available yet, but you can see a demo screencast at http://www.screencast.com/users/tsierra/folders/Jing/media/a942b387-a8f4-4254-b06f-cfab2723c7bb.

Has your school developed an iPhone or other mobile application? Tell us about it in the comments!