Chris Peters's blog

Teaching, learning and research have always been social activities involving heavy reliance on trust, reputation and brand awareness., and these social aspects of information seeking behavior grow more prevalent every year. This natural tendency to seek reliable, community-validated information sources has traditionally drawn people to libraries for two reasons.

News about an update to Google Reader can’t compete with the buzz surrounding the launch of the iPad, but any feature that helps us mitigate information overload is good news in my opinion, especially if you happen to be a reference librarians or an information junkie. 

If you've been following the economic stimulus bill (The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 or ARRA) and its impact on libraries, you know that it allocates $7.2 billion to encourage investment in America's broadband infrastructure. Of that money, $200 million has been specifically allocated to expand public computing capacity in libaries and community colleges.

I'm a big fan of calculators such as the IT Staff Calculator
that Lori Ayres developed for planning and estimating your IT staff
needs. They're not perfect of course, but they give you a sense of the
big picture and whether your projections line up with the experiences
of other libraries.

The catch is that first preference goes to a small library in the Louisville, KY area. Yep that narrows it down some, but this plea for help from Michelle at the Consuming Louisville blog is something all libraries should look at. She wants to buy books for one of her local libraries, and she reaches lots of people who feel the same way, so she's starting a virtual book drive.

I normally blog about library technology, but I'd like to take a break from that today and do a fun post from the "great writers in the library" genre. I've heard a million of these stories, but I never get tired of them (btw, does anyone know of a site where they're collected?). This one is the story of Carl Sagan's first visit to the library from Cosmos (pg. 133):

Lesson 3: Successful Libraries Ask for Help.

We heard over and over how vital it is to look outside the library for advice, ideas, elbow grease and partnership opportunities.

Lesson 2: Buying Computers for a Library is More Complicated than it Looks

When I need a computer, I pray to the budget gods, log onto a PC manufacturer’s website (e.g. Dell or HP) and configure a machine. It’s pretty easy and the computer arrives a week or two later.

I gave a short presentation recently on the 5½ Big Lessons that I learned while assembling, writing and editing the MaintainIT Cookbooks. Needless to say, I borrowed these insights from the hundreds of knowledgeable, hard-working librarians we interviewed over the past three years. Each lesson deserves some eleboration, so I’m going to write about each as a separate post over the next few weeks.