Louise Alcorn's blog

In the spirit of this spooky season, I wanted to address some Wireless Horror Stories – potential issues and problems with wireless. Remarkably, I’ve had a hard time finding stories of real horror. Especially in the last few years, during which time wireless has become more prevalent and therefore implements more smoothly. The usual response from libraries has been “the wireless project went just fine." So much for horror...

Use this "Quick Look" checklist to make sure you’re covering your bases when it comes to crafting a wireless policy for your library. For more information on wireless policies, check out an earlier post on the topic.

Recently I wrote a post about marketing your wireless service. It sparked a number of excellent comments, including some questions on policy. I decided they were worth answering in a longer form, including some helpful tips cribbed from my book on Wireless Networking for Libraries which I thought would be helpful.

“Yeah, we have wireless at our library…but we don’t tell anyone about it!” When I began looking at wireless for my library, I heard this more than once from other libraries. I found this very odd. If you had a new storytime format or some new DVDs, would you keep them a secret? What is it about wireless, or wi-fi, that has some libraries so scared? Is it that the technology is so new and/or difficult? Well, we’ve been providing some sort of Internet access at most libraries for some years now and technically wireless is simply another way to provide that access.