MaintainIT Project--Library technology ideas for librarians, FROM Librarians

Ever wonder what other libraries are/have been doing with technology in their libraries? Librarians "wear so many hats" and time is very precious. But allow me to point you to a "menu" of what I hope will be a very valuable resource. It's called the MaintainIT Project. Quoting from their website "The MaintainIT Project is a three-year project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We are working with public libraries to identify best practices of technical support for public computers. The Project works with libraries throughout the U.S. and Canada...MaintainIT is a project of TechSoup, (www.techsoup.org) a nonprofit with extensive experience helping other nonprofits use technology effectively."

Rodney, why should I take time from my busy day to look at this? Well they have interviewed and sought out from librarians all across the nation about library technology ideas, plans, implementations, and resources that deal directly with where you live everyday while at work. They use key words like "cookbooks" and "recipes" as their theme for these insights.

As of this writing they have 2 cookbooks. The first cookbook, "A Cookbook For Rural And Small Libraries", covers topics such as how to plan a technology plan, discussions about various spyware and anti-virus tools, how to utilize volunteers in your library, and many others.

The second cookbook entitled "Recipes for a 5-Star Library"; examples of topics such as starting a wireless network in your library. Have you thought how much help should your library staff give to patrons with regards to their laptops? Well there is a section that gives some insights on this subject. As well as other valuable topics .

Besides the cookbooks, they offer library spotlight articles on their website. Personally I would like to suggest calling them "appetizers" (hint hint) that you can download articles about. They also have a newsletter that you can sign up for. And much more.

It is nice to have quick library technology resources for libraries FROM libraries and MaintainIT is a great resource to find them. I hope you take some time to go through some of these recipes.

Bon Appetit/Buen Provecho everyone!

Rodney

Can you open this MS office attachment?

This blog posting is one that I had in edit mode and almost deleted. I thought it might be insightful, but then I thought "nah". However this morning a coworker sent me an email asking if I could open an office attachment. It was an office word document, and all other documents worked just fine, but why not this one? Well this was a document created with the newer version of Microsoft Office 2007. And there are some differences. Differences that could cause persons to be in the same situation my coworker was in. I felt now was a good time to talk about the new office format. This format not only looks different in the appearance, but also inside the coding (under the hood so to speak) of it as well. Now I am not going to bore you with many technical differences, but there are a few points I would like to make. The new format saves files using Open XML, the XML stands for Extensible Mark Up Language. According to Microsoft, this format makes files about 75 percent smaller (compression) than older office formats. And XML was created to structure, store and to send information, as well as being compatible with the older formats.

As one of my former college professors use to say "who cares?" (Love ya Boz)
Well you might...someday. You see the problem may be from older formats to the newer one. A large number of AALS libraries are using an earlier version of MS office. Whether this is office 2003, XP or 2000. This is fine if you are sending an attachment to someone who has the latest version. But if they send you an office 2007 file you may have an error message stating that you need to install the Microsoft compatibility pack in order to view the file.

Just a quick blog to hopefully help with getting rid of a small irritant as you do your every day data processing projects.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Rodney