How do you maintain your public computers?
Librarians want to know.
Librarians want to know.
Libraries have been quite successful using wish lists to expose their needs. When a community member sees something tangible they can donate, such as a printer or a bookshelf, they often feel motivated to help out. This is not a new idea. At the Rural Library Sustainability Workshop, libraries shared stories of televisions, paint, art supplies, and other commodities community members donated.
I attended a session titled Technical Services 2.0: Using Social Software for Collaboration, and a panelist mentioned a service provided by Amazon where regular people can bid for jobs at Amazon. An example he provided was a person transcribing a podcast and receiving around a dollar for doing it.
This topic sparked an idea. What if libraries created a community wiki, where needs as skill-oriented as Web design and as tangible as bookshelves were listed? What if a person in Tallahassee, FL were able to create a web site for Buckeye Public Library in AZ, and a retired techie were alerted to a need at her hometown library in Central City, IA? A community like Freecycle.org is a good example for how harnessing and broadcasting needs—for free!—can have powerful results.
Any takers?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Tell us about your daily routine maintaining public computers, or a moment when you were particularly proud. Don't forget that what might be "that's nothing" to you may be an "aha!" to someone else!
Visit TechSoup to find donated and discounted software and technology products for your library.
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