This month at the FLA conference in St. Pete Beach, FL, Sherry Millington, the Director of Suwannee River Regional Library, took part in the MaintainIT presentation, "Leading the Way: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Computing." As part of her talk, she spoke about techniques her library uses to save money and to keep aging technology out of the landfill. This is no easy task: Suwannee River Regional Library serves a rural community, and Sherry admitted that implementing green technology practices can be a difficult proposition.

Cool news from the TechSoup blog:
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Are there tech resources you're having trouble finding? Technology challenges you're facing? Support you'd like when using TechSoup?

I went to an hour long presentation at Aspiration Tech on Wednesday night, where Allen “Gunner” Gunn talked about the potential pitfalls of hosting your data online. However, he used this subject as a jumping off point to discuss the broader topics of data privacy, data security, planning and documentation.

Have a bit of bad news, and a ton of good news to report about the Flickr for Good partnership with TechSoup:

First, (because it's good to get the bad stuff over right away) there's one major mistake on the Flickr for Good web site that I'd like to clear up here:

Today, Flickr and TechSoup joined forces to offer a terrific program for public libraries and non-profits, called Flickr for Good.

Much of what we learn from public libraries can be described as "successes" or "best practices" or "hip hip hooray, it went well!" But so much can be learned from the things we don't really want to brag about, the challenges, the stuff we "should've known," and the "oops!"

Here's where you come in.

TechSoup (MaintainIT's parent organization), is gearing up to give you free stuff to keep spam at bay. Check it out!

I bet you didn't know that for the past 5 years, TechSoup has inaugurated November as Stop Spam Today month!

What can you do to reduce the amount of junk you receive in your in box, or even--as I just learned from the TechSoup blog--your MP3 player?