Lori Ayre's blog

I've been working on the issue of staffing IT departments in libraries. There's a wide range of how it is done ranging from having an in-house IT group (or person) to using the County or City IT Department (which probably considers the library a low priority) to outsourcing with a local tech support company to asking the Reference Librarian's grandchild to come in to help once in a while.

I just learned about the origins of card catalogs. Did you know they came to be because after the French Revolution, the new French government had a bunch of books they needed to sell or burn or put somewhere so they decide to inventory them.

Consumer Reports has come out with a useful evaluation of Internet filters for home use entitled "Filtering software: Better but still infallible" (June 2005). Here are some highlights:

Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) seems to be fighting an uphill battle with AB 682, a bill originally designed to prohibit the use of RFID in driver's licenses, student IDs, government health and benefit cards and public library cards. Now, instead of prohibiting the use of RFID, the bill mandates security measures that must be used when employing RFID on such documents.

I just discovered an excellent resource for everyone involved in website design, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Research-based Web Design and Usability Guidelines (2003).

Each chapter (available as a separate PDF) focuses on a component such as Design Process and Evaluation, Accessibility, The Homepage, Page Layout, Navigation, Content Organization, etc. There are 17 chapters.