If you are like the millions of people buying the latest smartphone, iPhone 5, or Samsung Galaxy S III, your local library should have something to offer you. The Emma S. Clark Memorial Library, for one, has an app for that! Dubbed "Emma Mobile," the library's application works with iOS (Apple), Android (Google), and Amazon Kindle Fire…

Why is it such a struggle to define and capture measures that convey to decision makers the value of libraries' services and programs to the communities, campuses, corporations, or organizations? To be honest, there are a number of reasons for this struggle--all of which can be addressed and, most importantly, solved. First, one has to face…

The Friends of the Pikes Peak Library District (PPLD) had a legacy website that was remotely hosted and maintained by a volunteer. They wanted a more significant presence on PPLD.org and an easier interface with which to update information. The developers decided to create a new Friends site in Drupal, using RWD, CSS3, and HTML5. The plan was to…

There is a growing shift to digital offerings among public libraries. Libraries increasingly are fulfilling roles as technology hubs for their communities, with high demand for technology and career development training resources. Ebooks and other digital materials are on the rise, while print is being scaled back. More libraries are turning to…

Managing a library collection at the national level follows quite a different set of assumptions than hold for typical academic or public libraries. These collections, often comprehensive of all materials published in a country, press the limits of scale in terms of the sizes of collections. A national library collection might, for example, stand…

The study looked into the 307 Koha libraries listed in Breeding's Library Technology Guides. Since all the tag clouds in Koha are user-contributed, their adoption and usage can shed light on the extent to which libraries are supporting user tagging. The research also revealed that public library users are more actively involved in tagging than…

In 2008 and 2009, the Edmonton Public Library (EPL), where the author works as an information professional, completed a $6 million CDN (about $5.7 million) RFID conversion project with the installation of automated check-in and sorting equipment at six of its 17 service points. The sorters currently handle about 55% of EPL's system's total…

Technology makes it possible to redefine libraries and make them relevant to the public once again. But how good are the digital services offered by public libraries today? The digital services department team of the Pode project at Norway's Oslo Public Library has spent the last 2 years investigating the possibilities available in order to…

The technology of the 21st century has had no shortage of challenges for libraries, but it has also brought opportunities. Operating systems, databases, and application environments that can use cheap off-the-shelf hardware to scale and handle hundreds of millions of transactions were not developed for libraries. However, libraries have taken…

In August 2008, the Missouri River Regional Library (MRRL), where the author serves as information technology coordinator, switched over from an internally hosted Microsoft Exchange email server to the Google Apps product. As the person who led the charge to use Google Apps and the person who actually flipped the switch, he was responsible for…

The Butte Free Public Library was established in 1894. At that time, head librarian J. Davies published a catalog of the opening collection. Two fires and one flood later, many of the monographs from that original collection list have, remarkably, survived. Because of this, in part, the library, now known as the Butte-Silver Bow Public Library…

Over the past few years, access to quality and meaningful training opportunities has become more challenging. Library training coordinators across the United States express the same frustration of trying to fill classes with staff members from library branches that often cannot spare a team member for training. In this article, the author, who is…

In 2008, we started by pulling a sample of 483 public libraries from across the country, using 2007 public library annual report data. Because small libraries have different needs and resources than larger libraries, we stratified the sample to make comparisons by size, according to the following population groups: fewer than 10,000 served;…

Since SC LENDS started operating in June 2009, more public libraries have come on board. All of this on the back end connects to a Mozilla-based staff client that has distributions for Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows, using SSL encryption to keep communications secure and private between remote libraries and the servers hosted at a high-end…

The public computing center offers an economical and environmentally friendly model for providing additional public computer access when and where it is needed. Though not intended to be a replacement for a full-service branch, the public computing center does offer a budget-friendly option for quickly expanding high-demand services into the…