Digital divide alive and well in Sauk Village

Daily Southtown article criticizes computer access fee at public library.
A second editorial addresses differences between the haves and the have nots.

The most disturbing part though is the failed partnership between the library and the school district. Here was a chance for a small-budget library to add 6 computer terminals.
The library currently has 4 + 1 OPAC.

Nancy McConathy Library Director Nannette Wargo said:

"You can do a lot of learning without a computer," said Wargo, who said the usage fees merely are a way to offset the cost of maintaining the library's four computers on a tight budget. She points to neighboring communities such as Harvey and Dolton that also charge similar fees.

She should have said neighboring POOR communities. As I'm unaware of any communities that actually border Sauk Village that charge for computer use, and budget probably does figure prominently.

They'll spend my tax dollars on downloadable audiobooks (link denied), but won't jump at the chance to get more computers?

For once, district 168 was going to spend money on something important and useful, and try to help the community, which is still bitter from the gross misuse of funds 2 years ago.

The library should be partnering with the schools in any way possible to enhance the kids' learning experiences. Where are these kids accessing online applications for jobs & school? Where are their parents accessing the internet, to fill out the online forms for gov't aid, apply for jobs, download tax forms, etc? (Well, some are using our hassle-free temporary internet cards to get online at Lansing.)

Arrrrgh!

Website Feedback Wanted!

Interestingly, over the past few weeks there have been a few blogs posting about Lansing Library's website. (positive ones)

I'm working on a re-design right now, with a launch in September. To meet that deadline, I won't get to clean up all the code on the back end on all the pages, (so resist the urge to view source--LOL)

We've added SO MUCH CONTENT since the website began in 2001.
Back then we never could have imagined we'd have blogs, IM, online fine payment, online registration for programs, and 2 online newsletters.

We had too many requests for things to be linked from the home page, but as new things were added we wanted to promote it all.

It was time to put the whole website in a blender, pulse, and dump it out and build from scratch.

The old site was created in FrontPage, the new one in Notepad++ with new XHTML and CSS skills (thanks Prof. Steve for teaching something practical!!)

I've got the upper tier of pages pretty much complete except for meta & tracking codes. Gail's working on rewriting the youth & teen dept pages, so those will be updated before the launch.

Early staff criticism: they are not fond of the category "user tools." Does anybody have a better label for that section?

Compare the old with the new, and please comment!

SWAN search in Firefox!

SWAN launched their new catalog interface last month.

Search 78 SWAN member libraries from your Firefox search box!


[disclaimer: I'm not the first to make a SWAN firefox search. Chris Deweese made a SWAN firefox search a couple of years ago, but it was not uploaded to http://mycroft.mozdev.org]
New plugins created with mycroft are are based on the OpenSearch standard.

Feel free to share this new version with your patrons!
Direct them to http://tinyurl.com/yomn9n