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Environmentally-friendly technology initiatives may be the only investments in the world right now guaranteed to show a return, and St. Patrick’s Day is almost upon us, so I thought I’d mention TechSoup’s GreenTech Initiative once again and recap some of our recent blog posts on this topic:
Say it with web conferences. Don’t drive to a meeting unless it’s absolutely necessary. There are dozens of web conferencing and phone conferencing tools available for free or at a low cost. Sarah wrote about web conferencing in January, and she linked to Jim’s post on the same topic. A one-year subscription to ReadyTalk is available to eligible and qualified public libraries through TechSoup for a $45 admin fee.
Make your servers disappear. In a mid-sized library, the power and cooling costs of multiple physical servers are often appalling from an accountant’s perspective and an environmentalist’s perspective. Fortunately, not every piece of server-based software requires its own dedicated piece of hardware. Virtualization is a technology that turns one server into many. Nate Solloway, Monique Sendze and Jim Lynch have all described virtualization initiatives at their organizations for us in recent months.
Vampire-proofing your library. Do you ever walk into your cube on Monday and realize that you left your monitor on all weekend? Even if you turned it off, did you unplug it? If not, chances are that it was still drawing some power. Last year Jim explained how energy vampires drain money and electricity and pointed to this nifty little vampire-slayer .
A Used PC is a Green PC. TechSoup’s RCI Initiative began selling refurbished computers to libraries this year. Every refurbished computer you buy is one less in the landfill, and it costs a fraction of what a new machine would cost.
If none of these tactics fit the bill for your library, check out Anna’s list of Ten Green Technology Resolutions and keep an eye on the GreenTech page for new articles, webinars and product promotions.
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