Cass District Library

Nothing like a big sigh of relief and an accompanying yelp of unfettered joy about a job well done--a deployment with zero explosions--as expressed by Evette Atkin, Systems Librarian for the Michigan Evergreen project at the Michigan Library Consortuim (MLC). Kudos to the Branch District Library for being MLC's first member library to migrate to Evergreen.

I’ve enjoyed following Kevin Smith’s blog, as he explores and implements Edubuntu. We talked with Kevin not so long ago when his dreams of installing Ubuntu products were just that: dreams.

Today I spoke with librarians from the four branches of the Plumas County Library. Margaret Miles, the director of the library, invited me to speak at their all-staff meeting, and we shared a provocative conversation covering many topics, from lockdown software, to tracking public computer use, to low-fi PC reservation processes, to patron training.

What happens when funds are scarce and librarians start leaning more into the techie category?

They get curious. And fearless. And they start using their information literacy skills to experiment with open source technologies to "squeeze every penny out of the machines we have," as Kevin Smith, from Cass District Library told us recently.