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Isn't that a lovely description for a library? A New York Times article, How Green is My Ipad?, discussed the ecological impact of e-readers. Their conclusion made me smile, "All in all, the most ecologically virtuous way to read a book starts by walking to your local library."

Check out NetSquared's new Community Organizers Handbook that covers all aspects of local community organizing. This wiki is a great resource for your library in connecting with community groups, whether through meetings and programs you sponsor, or by sharing this resource with your local groups. 

The Association for Rural & Small Libraries (ARSL) and the Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services (ABOS) will have their 2010 ARSL-ABOS Joint Conference in Denver, Colorado, on October 14-16. The theme is "Magic in the Mile High City." Designed for directors, staff and trustees of small libraries, bookmobiles and outreach staff, attendees will find information that is helpful, practical and relevant. Sarah Washburn will be sharing about TechSoup in her session, "No Need to Reinvent the Wheel: Learn from the Experiences of Others."

Tomorrow, August 25, 2010, WebJunction is hosting a two-hour symposium that will feature presentations on current trends and practical approaches to library digitization and preservation projects.

Register Now to join in learning about:

This report has been out a few months, but I finally got a chance to look at it. I was surprised that it is only 2 pages (could have read it sooner!). But it is full of great stats about the varied roles libraries play in our communities (economic, social and cultural). This report is great for distribution at community meetings, and it could also be emailed to appropriate leaders and shared with all library staff. The technology training statistics caught my eye:

It doesn’t matter if your library is large or small, or if you have a complex network or have no server at all. Knowing about online collaboration tools can help organizations and individuals be more effective, for less money, especially when your staff is not located in one central place.

We want our free library technology webinars to be true learning experiences. Each month we have a 3-4 question survey to gather your thoughts and ideas to make sure we're offering products and services useful to you and your library. Please take this brief survey to share with us what you have learned in our webinars and we'll enter your name in a monthly prize drawing.

In March of this year, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) began the ongoing, rolling announcement of the first round of grantees under the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP).

A lot of nonprofits and libraries don't know about TechSoup and miss out on our donated hardware and software opportunities, and our free webinars, articles, and expert-led community forums. Help Us Help Them! If you tell your nonprofit colleagues about TechSoup, thousands of charitable organizations across the country can increase their impact with the help of product donations from our 41 donor partners. A few easy ways you can do this:

Lockdown utilities have been on my mind, mostly because we continue to hear from libraries wondering how to protect their public computers due to the precarious situation that the Windows 7 and Windows SteadyState situation has caused. We've offered some alternatives to SteadyState in previous posts, and covered lockdown utilities in our first Cookbook (pdf), but I thought some recent experiences from the field might offer some help for libraries seeking a new solution.