Long ago, in the twitterless, 1.0 dark age of 2003, I got one of the coolest jobs in the world—I was a bookmobile driver at the Champaign Public Library.  Aside from the obvious perk of getting to drive a huge bus around town, this job really gave me a perspective on how libraries can be a bridge to bring different communities together. To me, the most fulfilling part of the job was knowing that in many cases, we truly were bringing library services to people who would not have had access to them otherwise.

The bookmobile served everyone—we stopped at retirement communities and pre-schools, the most-upscale neighborhoods and the most economically challenged.

I was thinking about my old job because I stumbled upon this post at No Shelf Required discussing Overdrive’s Digital Bookmobile. Read more »

There are many stories from the 2008 ALA Annual conference in Anaheim, from Google being MIA on the exhibition floor to what happens when a few hundred librarians descend onto Disneyland. But my favorite story from my time in Anaheim starts like this... Read more »

"If people were better informed about social networking sites and knew and used basic Internet safety tips, the cloud of fear may decline."—Robert Doyle, Executive Director of the Illinois Library Association

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Recently, the Maintain IT Project has been mentioned on various electronic-discussion lists and blogs. The Maintain IT Project is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and is gathering information and success stories about Public Access Computers (PACs) in public libraries. Eventually, the project team plans to compile the stories and make them available to libraries as a troubleshooting resource.

I was intrigued by the project idea and wanted to know more—this could very well be an invaluable resource for libraries in the future—so I contacted the leader of the project, Barbara Gersh.

MB: Can you tell me a little bit about what the Maintain IT Project is?

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Last Thursday's New York Times contained an article (a no-cost subscription is required) that provides a progress report on the $100 laptop initiative, officially known as One Laptop per Child (OLPC). The project is based at MIT's Media Lab and was first announced in January 2005. Led by Nicholas Negroponte, the OLPC project proclaims its main outcome goal thus: “a unique harmony of form and function; a flexible, ultra low-cost, power-efficient, responsive, and durable machine with which nations of the emerging world can leapfrog decades of development—immediately transforming the content and quality of their children's learning.”

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