LibraryTechtonics

A whole lot’s been going on at work, and with NaNoWriMo and the holidays to contend with, I’ve gone almost completely LibraryTechtonics AWOL. On one hand it makes me sad; I’ve got a pile of things to blog, and I haven’t had a moment to give them. On the other hand, I feel like different things in general life and at work (at Reading and for PLA) are falling into better place, so I think balance will return soon. If I can just keep from getting sick every time I go away from home, it would be much easier. (Both the husband and I came back from Thanksgiving with a bug. Hurray. Honest. I’m ecstatic.)

The title on this post was a line in an email from one of my fellow librarians at Reading. (Alas, while I’ve been super busy, I haven’t really been good about getting back on the blogging horse. The irony!) One of the many fabulous things that’s happened at work at Reading is that we’ve been able to get computers on the desks of all of the librarians. Yep, we each have our *own* computer. I opted out of the purchase, since I take my laptop to work everyday, and it seemed right by me to save the money on the extra computer.

The previous workroom setup was such that there were 3 shared computers running Windows 2000 (eewwww!) with horribly inefficient configurations, all sorts of infected with spyware and all sorts of other nonsense. I believe the funding came from the Foundation (hurray!) to acquire new computers for all of the reference librarians, the children’s librarian, and an extra computer for any employee in the library to use.

What I found most interesting about the entire transition was the necessary changes to the environment that needed to be made so that each desk could accomodate a computer, monitor, and keyboard. Reading Public Library as a building was an elementary school once upon a time, so the rooms are big with outlets distributed sparingling along the walls, and each librarian has a large, old-school wooden desk. Everyone was very accustomed to working with books and piles on their desks, and then moving to the computer area to work on computery stuff.

With the shift came a big purge. *Huge* purge. People found things they thought they’d thrown away, or gave to someone else, or belonged to the person who had the desk before them. Everyone had to make space on their desks for these computers, and shift things from desks to shelves and such. They were happy to do it, though the task itself was daunting. Our custodians really earned their keep in that week!

Running extenstions and wires to the center of the room was interesting (better wiring will be taken care of at a later date), but otherwise, the installs were pretty painless. All of the computers are connected to the networked laserjet printer. It’s like a real office.
I’ve always been playfully taunted by the gals at work about my desk. It’s always so… empty. Tidy small piles, file folders in a thing on top of my desk, everything else in folders, a few trinkets to make my space festive, and a big, empty space where my laptop goes when I come in. So often the gals have apologized (or openly *not* apologized :D) for using my desk when I’m not in, because it was the only spare, clean space around.

My past experience in offices has always included a computer on the desk. When a computer lives on your desk, you either have a balance of workspace, paperspace, and digital space, or a hodge podge of organization. In any case, in order for me to set up my laptop and work efficiently in the few hours I have at Reading every week, it’s got to be organized. Slowly, the other librarians are learning why and how I organize my space so sparingly now that they have the same issues to content with. It’s interesting.

In any case, when we planned the transition, my boss Lorraine and I discussed how to back up the data on the ancient machines (without the luxury of CD writeable drives). The end result was to place everything in the My Documents folder on each machine, and then move those folders to one of the new machines (Rachel volunteered). However, we planned all this before I went to Monterey, and when Kathy asked me for her photos on Monday, I’d completely forgotten what we did with them. I asked about it yesterday, and was able to pop everything on the spare CD-RW disk I keep in my desk (I need to order some for the library next week), and left it on Kathy’s desk, followed up by an email on how to use the Scanner and Camera Wizard on Windows XP to get the photos.

In another world, a 3-day turnaround is license for your supervisor to have a sit-down with you about your attentiveness to time-sensitive tasks. In the library, it’s lightning fast. I’m still getting used to the difference. I kinda like it better this way.
In any case, Ruth, our director, is having an architect friend of hers come in and evaluate the workroom space for renovations, to give us some ideas. We’re looking at the potential for new desks and workspaces, as well as renovated storage and better wiring. In the meantime, the librarians are having all sorts of fun setting up their new machines, and learning to really customize their digital workspace.

Corinne, our children’s librarian, opted to make Firefox her new default browser because she’d never used it before, and she wanted to try something new. I love the people I work with, so willing to try new stuff! She was entirely new to the concept of news feeds, but being an intrepid librarian on a new internet adventure, she decided to try setting them up, and I got to help her figure out how to add RSS feeds to her Firefox toolbar (something, truth be told, I was only a little familiar with).

Some of the next steps in the library technology upgrade plan include adding an internal file server. Due to a complication in the old systems management model, which relied entirely on a Windows Active Server running in the basement connected to specific machines, we can’t harvest that server for file fun until we finish reimaging the computers in the children’s room (the new computer images make them stand-alone configurations on a shared physical network, on a separate VLAN from the staff computers, but not dependent on a server for permissions controls and whatnot). Hopefully we’ll have the children’s room computers set before Christmas, and maybe a file server as a present for the new year.

Long catch up posts are exhausting to write. I can only imagine what they’re like to read. ;D

Action item: post more often. Check.

Tags: work