NEKLS

Kudos to the organizers for featuring an "Innovation in Smaller Libraries" track at this year's Computers in Libraries Conference in DC. It's great to see national level conferences including options like this.

Thanks to Jean Montgomery, from the Upper Peninsula Region of Library Cooperation in Michigan, for leading today's MaintainIT webinar, "Free and Open Source Software in Libraries". Thanks also to the many participants. It was great to hear about all of interesting free and open source software products being used in libraries.

Remember how I was a library director the last time I blogged about Koha? Life was so much simpler then. Koha migration from the administrative side is full of "opportunities for creative problem solving," like figuring out how to keep track of decisions, discussions, questions, bugs, problems, perks, and quirks related to the catalog and the migration process.

On Friday, August 1st, I attended and presented at the Northeast Kansas Library System's annual Tech Day. Michael Porter, AKA Libraryman, kicked the day off with an inspiring and engaging presentation about "gadgets". It was exciting to hear about technologies that will be impacting us not only in the future, but also right now.

Just attended the 30-minute webinar, "Notes on setting up wireless at your library," featuring Sharon Moreland and Liz Rea from the Northeast Kansas Library System (my old stomping grounds!). I feel the same way I did after the other 30-minute webinars: "Wow! I cannot believe we covered that much in that short amount of time!" I like the quick, practical approach and think it suits the busy life of a librarian well.

Had a migration meeting on Friday and learned that the timeline has been bumped up by two months! Over Memorial Day Weekend, all holds between our NExpress libraries and the rest of the consortium will be shut off. Questions were brought up about "orphaned" holds and what kind of message a patron will get if/when they try to put a hold on some newly forbidden fruit-like item.

Whenever I introduce some new program, service, collection, or web site feature, I have a small worry that it will backfire. If I were in a large system, I'd do surveys and interviews and find out before I launched that it would be well received. Well, I'm not in a big system, so I just do it.

Welcome Sharon Moreland, our most recent guest blogger!

Sharon is the Director at the Tonganoxie Public Library in Kansas, and a contributor to the Cookbooks. Sharon will be a regular blogger for MaintainIT, telling the tale of her experiences with Koha as her library starts a new chapter with open source.

Welcome, Sharon!
(Oh, and I was the one who added the photo of Sharon to her post. I couldn't help myself!) :)
-sarah

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