Technology in the Library

I attended the technology conference in Austin last week.  I enjoyed learning about all the new things that are becoming available in education.  Although it is difficult to implement some technology when our budgets seem to shrink each year.  Yes, we are constantly asked to do more with less, but our students are the ones who are truly paying the price each year.  The business world has the funds to keep up with our fast paced technological world, which leaves our students hurrying to catch up as they emerge into the real world. 

But, there I go, getting on my soap box and losing sight of what I wanted to focus on!  At the technology conference, I was able to spend my time in various library-technology sessions.  As we all know, things are moving towards ebooks, but we're not there yet.  I spoke to several vendors who have are promoting ebooks for libraries.  However, overwhelmingly, what I found with these vendors is that they don't have many books that students will actually want to read.  Their selection of books is extremely disappointing.  They focus heavily on nonfiction and easy reader books.  In my experience, students prefer to check out fiction unless they are doing a project.  Sure, I can go to Amazon and download just about any ebook that I want.  However, that isn't feasible for a library because of access and copyright issues.  I can also subscribe to Overdrive and get a large selection of ebooks, but it is extremely expensive, which is not practical for a small school library.  I am getting ebooks for the library, but until they improve their selections, I don't see the library going primarily to ebooks for a long time.

I also want to introduce our library's new mobile website.  It has all the links you need to access our catalog, databases, ebooks, etc, on your mobile device.  I am working on creating bookmarks with a QR code that can take you directly to the mobile site. 
Check it out here and bookmark it on your phone, or scan the QR code below!