Sarah Washburn's blog

Last month in Philadelphia, the Edge Coaltion had plenty of opportunities to learn what librarians and staff from libraries big and small thought about the benchmarks being created to support public access technology.

If you've ever been involved in creating something the public sees or uses, you know how setting it free feels: you're vulnerable, you want others to believe in it, to see what you see, you want positive feedback. For me, I want to know what people think. To really know, even if it's negative, because that's important information I can use.

At a recent ALA MidWinter session on the Edge Initiative, Larra Clark from ALA OITP ended her remarks with, "the benchmarks are meant to be kicked. So kick it." Thus launched a focus group exercise where approximately 50 attendees were asked to provide feedback to a draft set of public access technology benchmarks.

TechSoup Global has been working on the Public Access Technology Benchmarks project for over a year now, and we're excited to share what we've learned, and what we hope will be useful tools for the library community.

If you're looking at our site using Chrome of Firefox, you no doubt noticed that something looks out of place on our home page.

As TechSoup and the other agencies working on the public access technology benchmark initiative get feedback and refine the benchmarks, the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) is doing a lot of work to document the process.

As I prepare to head to Frisco, TX for the 2011 Association for Rural & Small Libraries conference, I thought I'd share what a few librarians have to say about what it means to lead a rural community's library. Enjoy.

If you don't know what ARSL is or why you should go, you should. Allow me to take a few steps back to get everyone up to speed: ARSL is the most excellent Association for Rural and Small Libraries, and next month is the organization's annual conference, where rural and small librarians and staff gather to learn from each other. Sound too good to be true?

Each year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation honors a public library or similar organization outside the United States with the Access to Learning Award. This award "recognizes the innovative efforts" of these organizations to "connect people to information through free access to computers and the Internet." We're pleased to report that this year a TechSoup Global partner, the Arid Lands Information Network (ALIN), received this one million dollar award!

When new projects first start, often teams feel a little unsure or unclear about what they're being asked to accomplish, conjuring up Gertrude Stein's, "there's no there, there," or maybe leaning more toward Bill Clinton's "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." At any rate, let's just say in the parlance of our time that you may have been a little fuzzy, like Gertrude and Bill once were.