open source

Last night I returned from a week-long trip to Colorado--a much-needed respite after the craziness leading up to ALA. While in Colorado, I stopped by the John C. Fremont Library in Florence, CO to check in on some new friends who happen to be doing some incredible stuff at their library.

Thank you to everyone who attended today's first MaintainIT book club. We discussed "Meal Plan 1: Setting Up a Wireless Network" from Recipes for a 5-Star Library. 18 people from around the country participated in the discussion. Topics ranged from basic wireless set-up to filtering to splash pages. 

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.

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.

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

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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.

An enthusiastic crowd of 84 librarians and staff members attended last week's webinar on keeping public computers running. Faye Hover, Renee Goss, and Marian Wynn shared their perspectives, experiences, and know-how on the importance of fearlessness, the power of collaborations, and the benefits of using open source technologies.

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.

Here at MaintainIT, we're always looking for a good story to share, and we couldn't pass up the opportunity to tell you about the Geneva Public Library, serving a town of just over 4,000, and sitting squarely on the cutting edge. Read this feature on how Marian Wynn, the intrepid library director, gave new life to her older public computers by implementing Ubuntu, a free, open source operating system.