May, 2008

I'm now in San Francisco at the MaintainIT/TechSoup offices, after having attended the NetSquared conference in San Jose. Post-conference my head is full of ideas about technology and innovation and potential connections. I think there's value in stepping outside of our own specific world of libraries now and then to look at what's happening with technology in other fields. What's happening in the corporate world, for example? Or, as I explored at NetSquared, what's happening in the larger world of non-profits?

Since joining the library profession in 1995, I have attended A LOT of library conferences. In the early years, I found the presentations most useful, as I learned more about the field I had entered. In recent years, however, I most look forward to the opportunity to see old friends and to have informal conversations with people in my library world. I read a lot of blogs and journal articles, etc... so the conference presentation material now feels very familiar.

Last week, I shared an excerpt from our next Cookbook about the pros of leasing computers. Today, I'll share what we've learned about the cons of leasing computers for your library:

Kudos to Louise Alcorn and Kami Griffiths for making the potentially dull topic of policies anything but dull! Today’s 30-minute webinar provided a lot of food for thought in a short amount of time. I was familiar with Louise and her work before the webinar because she literally wrote the book on wireless networking in libraries. During the webinar, however, I also discovered that she and my friend and fellow Johnson County (KS) resident Josh Neff are old pals! Josh was a webinar participant today, too, and told me that he and Louise went to summer camp together many, many years ago and recently got in touch again on Facebook – ah, it’s a wonderfully small and socially networked world!

Do you have wireless, want wireless, or feel like you could better explain the ins and outs of wireless usage to your patrons?

If you answered yes, maybe, or sorta to any of these questions, MaintainIT has a 30-minute solution for you. TODAY.

Had a migration meeting on Friday and learned that the timeline has been bumped up by two months! Over Memorial Day Weekend, all holds between our NExpress libraries and the rest of the consortium will be shut off. Questions were brought up about "orphaned" holds and what kind of message a patron will get if/when they try to put a hold on some newly forbidden fruit-like item.

In most of my recent jobs, my mom has had a hand in helping me out. When I worked at the Gates Foundation as part of the US Library program, she offered feedback on materials we distributed along with the granted computers. When we started the September Project, she engaged not only her local library, but just about every library to which she had a connection, which was a lot!

We've heard from a lot of libraries who have leased computers in their libraries, and since a librarian we were interviewing yesterday asked for more information on that topic, I thought I'd offer a sneak peak at what we're writing in the next Cookbook. If you've leased computers in your library, please share your experiences in a comment, and please also let us know who you are, so we chat more with you and include your ideas in the next Cookbook!

In a recent comment to our latest poll, Dave Jackson offered his thoughts on his favorite tools (or lack thereof) for learning:

Whenever I introduce some new program, service, collection, or web site feature, I have a small worry that it will backfire. If I were in a large system, I'd do surveys and interviews and find out before I launched that it would be well received. Well, I'm not in a big system, so I just do it.

How a library IT Manager supports her system’s computers today, while keeping an eye on the future
In the northernmost part of Kentucky, Boone County Public Library is a relative newcomer to the 210-year-old county. It was only 35 years ago when the library was imagined, and has been a part of Boone County for 32 years. Since then, the library has wasted little time in catching up: today there are five branches meeting the needs of over 100,000 people. Boone County's rapid growth (it’s been among the top 50 fastest-growing counties in the United States) and prosperity have given the library the added benefit of an unusually generous budget.

This month at the FLA conference in St. Pete Beach, FL, Sherry Millington, the Director of Suwannee River Regional Library, took part in the MaintainIT presentation, "Leading the Way: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Computing." As part of her talk, she spoke about techniques her library uses to save money and to keep aging technology out of the landfill. This is no easy task: Suwannee River Regional Library serves a rural community, and Sherry admitted that implementing green technology practices can be a difficult proposition.

Welcome Sharon Moreland, our most recent guest blogger!

Sharon is the Director at the Tonganoxie Public Library in Kansas, and a contributor to the Cookbooks. Sharon will be a regular blogger for MaintainIT, telling the tale of her experiences with Koha as her library starts a new chapter with open source.

Welcome, Sharon!
(Oh, and I was the one who added the photo of Sharon to her post. I couldn't help myself!) :)
-sarah

----