Monday, August 17, 2009

Library Journal Article on "Self Service Library"

Congratulations Susan Kantor-Horning on an article well-done . I know this article is a little overdue (pun intended) but that's on par with the whole project. In Yuba County at our Wheatland location, the GoLibrary has yet to offer uninterrupted service for more than 3 weeks running. The good news is that the problems these days are minor, usually a book/box is stuck. The bad news is that it means a 30 minute trip for someone to go out to the machine and back in order to un-stick it.

For those interested, I wanted to add a vendor to the list mentioned in your article. mkSorting has designed and created a state of the art version of book dispenser and it would seem mkSorting intends to beta test the machine before bringing to it market. We have heard from the vendor that they anticipate their machine to be ready for release before the end of the year.

Monday, August 10, 2009

ARRA's auras

Figuring out what's up with the fed funds potentially out there for libraries, is like pppp'ing in the wind. Funding will go mostly to commercial applications and we will be tasked with providing the markets, then training the markets, then providing free access to the well-trained markets. We must play the knowledge management card in order to take a stand as the great equalizers in the middle of the great divide.