SLA talk: Doing More With Less

Hi. Thanks so much to everyone who made me feel welcome and dealt with our extension cord search when they were already full of food and working on dessert at the SLA meeting this evening. I had a great time giving the talk and I hope you revisit it to follow the links we didn’t have time to click-click-click through. The talk is here: Doing More with Less, High Tech on a Shoestring. If you scroll all the way to the end of it and click on the “printable” link you can see the notes that I actually (sort of) read from.

rfid library tags unlocked, vulnerable

RFID hacking in, among other places, libraries. More on RFID.

As he waves the reader over a book’s spine, ID numbers pop up on his monitor. “I can definitely overwrite these tags,” Molnar says. He finds an empty page in the RFID’s memory and types “AB.” When he scans the book again, we see the barcode with the letters “AB” next to it. (Molnar hastily erases the “AB,” saying that he despises library vandalism.) He fumes at the Oakland library’s failure to lock the writable area. “I could erase the barcodes and then lock the tags. The library would have to replace them all.”

truer words have rarely been spoken

Why is it so hard to say that some things simply suck? I’ll quote Casey Bisson, quoting himself.

Please, stand with me now and repeat:

When something sucks I will say so. When vendors spout crap I will call them on it. My staff deserve good tools, my users need good tools, and I can’t afford to buy stuff that sucks.

Together, we’ll fix the world one product at a time.

Related story: State of our ILS

It’s a new world and building onto a system that is more than 15 years old isn’t going to cut it anymore – there needs to be a new system, one that allows for more freedom, and it has to come soon, because more and more libraries are going to turn to open-source.