Wireless

Many of you may be familiar w/the first Cookbook released by TechSoup’s
MaintainIT Project. Well, now they have released another! It includes practical
tips and techniques and stories from libraries around the country.

Download the FREE Joy of Computing: Recipes for a 5-Star Library here: http://maintainitproject.org/cookbooks

Find out what libraries and library supporters had to say about wireless, time
and print management, and laptop checkout programs. Kudos to the following Kansan contributors, whose experiences were included to help make this Cookbook a practical and handy resource:

Sharon Moreland, Tonganoxie Public Library

Kim Priest, Mary Cotton Public Library

Ken Werne, Johnson County Library

Jamie Kelley, Marysville Public Library

The MaintainIT Project will continue to create guides focused on supporting public computers. You can share your challenges and successes so libraries can learn from *your* experiences, too. Remember, what may be, “that’s nothing!” to you, may be an “aha” to someone else! Email my friends Sarah, Chris, and the rest of the team if you’re interested in being involved: maintainit@techsoup.org.

I received the following cartoon in the email the other day. I’m sure the person who sent it wanted me to laugh about it (which I did) but it brought to mind some very important things about designing libraries to fit the changing nature of technology.

Two things struck me… One, the people are not sitting in chairs at all. Clearly, in this library, the chairs are somewhere else, not accessible to the only thing wireless users are chained to anymore: power. Two, the area around the power is not an organized space. It’s just some pillar in the stacks that happens to have an outlet on it!

This made me think, well hey, maybe we should design libraries to be more usable for our wireless patrons. We’ve given them convenient Internet access, now let’s make it convenient for them to use it. Put comfy chairs and tables near power sources so these wired (wireless!) patrons can “get off the floor,” or at least congregate in a space that is better suited to their wireless endeavours.

I must admit that this is something I’ve neglected to suggest when presenting about wireless access in libraries, and I was struck this morning by the reality that I’ve put in many wireless access points without suggesting to my librarians that they might want to rearrange a bit to make the new service more functional and comfortable for patrons to use.

Any thoughts on this? Any libraries making an effort to organize the space in a “wireless patron friendly” manner?

Everybody knows that for a service to catch on, people have to know that it exists. If you have wireless available for patrons in your library, we’ve come up with the following graphic for putting in your library window. It will work in Northeast Kansas (we are the Northeast Kansas Library System, after all) and you can print it out, or put it in a word document and add your library’s name… maybe a “brought to you by” type of thing.

Anyway, here it is:

If you right click the image, and select save, you can save the full resolution version to your computer. Have fun!

The September 2005 issue of Consumer Reports contains the long-awaited Online Survival Guide. The article discusses security, internet service providers, home networks, and computers–both laptop and desktop. Of particular interest to wireless users is the box on page 23, which describes what you can do to keep your wireless connection secure. Among the tips:

Activate encryption
Change your router’s default password
Disguise your network
Create a computer “guest list.”

Man oh man! Tech day was a blast… keep watching here for the next few days to catch some of the Tech Day 2005 excitement… we’ll be posting photos, video of the keynote and some of the sessions, all of the powerpoints from the day, and additional resources for all of your consumption.

I think all of our minds were expanded by Jenny Levine, the Shifted Librarian. There is much to be done for Kansas libraries and blogging/rss/wiki/folksonomy. A world of conversation between our patrons and the library awaits us, all we have to do is harness it. I think that soon we’ll be having a workshop for “introduction to blogger” but you didn’t hear it here.

Remember that you can get ahold of your friendly NEKLS tech staff through MSN messenger (more services coming soon) by adding lrea@nekls.org to your buddy list (we like to hear from you!) or bhough@nekls.org. Send us a friendly message!

We’re also opening up comments on this blog, so we want to hear what you think! Comment! We like it when you do!

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