LibraryTechtonics

Yesterday I received an update from SirsiDynix about an upcoming webinar (they’re webinars are generally really good, and, best of all, free), which kinda reads as half helpful infomration, half infomercial, on their OneStop “all-in-one self-service solution.” OneStop reads as a Swiss army knife of circulation tasks, handling check in, check out, fines, computer sign-up, printing payment, and information updates.

I proceded to have mixed feelings about it.

See, at my library, we don’t have fines, except for the Express items, which are free for the first two days, and $0.25/day after that. We don’t do computer sign up, because while our computers are often occupied, we’ve never had a problem with making sure everyone has a computer when they need it. Printing costs $0.10/page, but we collect that at the circulation desk, and while we’ve pondered the use of a print management system, it’s not something we could put in the budget until next fiscal year, if we wanted to pursue it. As for patron information updates, we can do those at reference or at circulation, and most people ask us to do that in passing, or by logging into their account in the catalog system.

So while I know that there are libraries that use *all* of these features, and would probably love a OneStop as an easy consolidation of tasks and processes, I couldn’t bring myself to be interested in it, even conceptually. After some pondering, I thought that maybe the infomercial aspect of the webinar really bothered me. I mean, it does make perfect sense that SirsiDynix would use a free webinar to do a little sell on one of their own solutions, given that so many of their other webinars cover other interesting topcis in librarianship, and are so generously free. And I’m sure the webinar would be immensely helpful for libraries that want more information but can’t physically go to such a presentation, even at a regional level. I think maybe it would interest me more as a comparison presentation, how the OneStop measures up to other systems like it, as a starting point to compare and contrast the solutions.

Further ponderance revealed that I was also bothered by the idea that this was touted as a tool to “empower the users with self-service.” As far as users are concerned, they are empowered with self-service without libraries or fancy library tools. Users are empowered by their own curiosity (”I wonder what happens if I click on this…” behavior), their need to just get things done (the “How do I just…?” questions we get all the time at my library’s reference desk), and their ability to perform independent online searching even on a basic, button-mashing level (”I just typed it into Google…”), and are becoming moreso all the time. They may not have the *best* information, they may not get the answer right the first time on their own, but they are more than able and *willing* to make a go at serving themselves.

I’m not sure how much libraries can empower users if we can’t get ahead of the societal learning and knowledge curve, as well as the societal innovation curve (not just in technology, but in the way people think about processes and their philosophies on what constitutes “customer service.” Libraries have spent a history telling people how to do things and how things are generally done (the process and usability nightmare that is the philosophy of library cataloging is a case in point), as opposed to asking them what they want or following how the way people are doing things changes, and changing with them, so the concept of patron empowerment, to me, is more of a necessary philosophy change profession-wide, and not a hardware fix like a self-service kiosk.

Don’t get me wrong, I know where SirsiDynix is coming from. I know their just promoting the OneStop as a tool that lets patrons help themselves. It’s catchy, and strong, and effective, and evokes positive feelings of productivity. But in a profession where libraries have been captive (or have let themselves *be* captive) to vendor ideas and methods, it just makes me think that it’s not acceptable to let little bits of marketing like that go unnoticed.

This may be old news, since it was posted to Mobility Today 14 hours ago, nevermind to Jake’s site a few days ago. I figured I’d put it out there anyway:

How to Sync Google Calendar with Outlook and Smartphones Automatically
[Jake Ludington's MediaBlab c/o Mobility Today]

Why librarians should care: If you have a smartphone, *or* a non-phone PDA, for that matter, and you’ve been playing with Google Calendar, you either may not know that you can export your Google Calendar to Outlook for download (since export features don’t seem to be built in, just looking at the settings) and then subsequently to your portable device. Or, you may know patrons who have this question.

After you get through the installation of the RemoteCalendars software, the fix lets you *sync* to and from Outlook 2003+. Yahoo Calendar offers the Intellisync for Yahoo downloadable app to allow syncing back and forth with different contact/calendar management applications and gadgets (including Outlook, Outlook Express, Palm OS Handhelds, Pocket PC Handhelds, Lotus Organizer, and ACT!, which is a step closer than Google Calendar right now). Hopefully Google will get on the syncing bit, or at least somehow hook up with RemoteCalendars a la Yahoo’s syncing app to make this less of a backroads hack and more of a built-alongside feature.

I’m guessing this could be altered relatively easily to work with other calendars that accept iCal files, but that’s just a guess. If you come up with a way to do it, or already have a way to do it, I’d love to hear about/link to it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m working on a project at Reading Public Library to revive the Netguides program. Netguides is a program where volunteers (mostly teens) are recruited and trained to be one-on-one technology help for patrons.

The Boy Scout (who has taken on the Netguides revival as his Eagle Scout project) has finally received approval from the elders, which means we can finally get started.

The Boy Scout will serve as a jack-of-all-trades in this project in roles that will more than cover the leadership requirement for Eagle Scouthood. He will help us assemble the physical manual as well as the content of the manual, which will contain policies, procedures, and forms; help to formulate a marketing campaign for the program, including logos and flyers; recruit fellow boy scouts and other teens to apply to the program; assist in choosing from the applicants; and assist in the Netguide training process. Once this is all set, we’ll have an established program that helps the community, and he’ll be released to his Eagle Scout nest.

We had all hoped (The Boy Scout, my boss, me, The Boy Scout’s Mom) that this project would be accomplished over the summer, so that we could have the program in place for the fall, but the approval process took all summer. So, the current plan is to have The Boy Scout start on the manual and recruitment portion now, and plan on training teens over the winter break for launch in January/February.

The Netguides program will dovetail nicely with my upcoming class schedule, allowing me to offer a wider variety of courses while the Netguides cover Mousing Around, Basic Internet, as well as offering one-on-one help in the Geek Out Don’t Freak Out classes. It will also work nicely with the Statewide Database and Promotion LSTA grant (scroll to the bottom of the page to see the abstract) we received to promote databases, freeing up time for me to work on the grant classes, and possibly assisting us in the grant classes or providing grant class follow up help.

So. Very. Excited. I’ll keep you posted.

I’ve been really happy with our public computer setup for a while now. We went from heavily locked down Windows 2000 machines, some of which were old and clunky on top of being on an antiquated operating system, to Windows XP machines that better mirror a normal computing environment with features (including Deep Freeze) that prevent anyone from breaking them.

About three weeks ago, one of the computers in our Computer Lab started acting a little funny. It was just the one computer, and since not every patron reports a problem with a computer (most likely for fear of being blamed for the problem), we don’t know how long it was happening before that, if at all.

The monitor would just turn off in the middle of work, and not turn back on again. The computer would stay on, and no amount of wiggling the mouse, turning the monitor off and on again, or tapping the keyboard keys would do anything. I tried to shut down the computer using a key sequence (if you hit the Windows button on the keyboard, then hit U and U again, provided there isn’t anything in your start menu that also starts with U, you can actually shut down your machine), the using Control-Alt-Delete (something I try only in bad situations), but neither worked.

Ultimately, I had to resort to the most awful solution: holding down the power button on the computer for 10 seconds until the machine powered itself down, and then pushing the power button again to turn it back on, a tactic that really shouldn’t be used unless all else fails.

The machine came back up, and the monitor worked fine. However, given any indiscriminate period of time, the problem would happen again. From what we could tell, and from what patrons told us, there didn’t seem to be anything obvious that caused this cute little problem. With just one machine exhibiting the problem, we figured we had 5 other computers in the lab (plus the 2 in the reference room, 1 in the business center, and 4 kiosk machines for basic web) to tide us over while we brought the infidel back into the fold of functioning public terminals.

Then the others started to follow suit. The 4 other Dell Optiplex 270s in the Computer Lab starting turning against us, a nearly full-scale technology mutiny. All except the 1 Dell Optiplex 280 seemed to be immune to this little quirk.

To our knowledge, there is a known hardware problem with some of the capacitors on the motherboards in the 270s, so, in a way, they can’t be blamed for the madness. However, that problem generally causes the entire computer to turn off spontaneously, not the monitors. At first I ventured a guess that it was the video card that was the issue, since I tested the computers with a brand new LCD monitor which had no positive effect on the issue (and ruled out the dying monitor theory, which was my very first guess). But, since we’ve since found that the issue can be recreated by browsing through directories (folders) on the computer, the new guess is that it’s not the video card, but still something either a) hardware in nature, or b) related to a recent Windows update that could be conflicting with hardware drivers.

Or something.

The latest news is that our town tech support has ordered hardware replacements from Dell (in accordance with our warranty contract) for the machines, but due to the part-time nature of my position, the fact that town tech support is 2 people with barely enough time to email updates, and the fact that my boss is on vacation this week, I don’t have all the details quite yet. We’re hoping the hardware replacements will fix the problem very soon.

All this to explain that this one computer issue has pretty much preempted a good deal of my other work for the past several weeks. (And, for those of you who have never been party to this kind of troubleshooting, hopefully this gives you a helpful inside look.) It’s been keeping me pretty busy on several different fronts, from hands-on troubleshooting to communicating with various forms of tech support to explaining the issue to staff, and determining how to explain it to patrons. Not to mention the stress of having a substantial library service, for all intents and purposes, not available. However, everyone has been working as a team, which makes it all a bit easier.

All the same, it’s pretty big, and has required many deep, cleansing breaths.

I’m not sure how the summer got away from me. I think that it has something to do with the post-ALA syndrome of coming back and trying to catch up after a week away, and then never really being caught up until a few months later.

After ALA, I came back to my new schedule of 25 hours a week, which is a huge shift from 10-17 hours a week. It requires a complete revamp of my current schedule, since I have projects for PLA and my own bloggy fun to work in my non-library hours, plus just my regular work from home routine, which usually consists of multitasking between work, life, and household stuff.

Let’s just say I’m still not settled into a schedule, and it’s been a little crazy.

However, I do feel like I’m getting a little closer to something I can call normal.

As was anticipated, we had no problems filling my new hours at work. When I say “we,” I mean me, my boss, other staff, and, most influentially, the computers. I kid you not; the computers at the library have suddenly become very, very needy. But I’ll get to that in a later post, to break up this updated into bite-sized chunks. No need to choke you all with a long post after such a long period of radio silence.
Overall, things are going well. I’ll post some updates on the projects I’ve been working on, my normal class planning fun, and some new and interesting things that have been added to my bag o’ responsibilities at work.