Still reeling after my busiest ALA ever. I suppose it’s possible that each year seems busier than the last, but I will ask you to remind me not to over commit next year . With 5 ppt presentations saved on my trusty WJ flashdrive (2 of them shorter, but still!), I wound my way through the week to a final panel presentation on Monday afternoon. I was privileged to present Keeping Your Computers Up and Running—We Can Help! with Dr Diane Neal from the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University and Brenda Hough from MaintainIT.

Along with our LITA hosts (Thanks to Irmgarde and Paul!) we prepared to present a range of information, beginning with Diane who provided thorough and practical pc, printer, network and Internet troubleshooting tips, and an excellent primer for how to communicate with IT support when you can’t fix it yourself. Next Brenda gave an excellent overview of MaintainIT project and provided an opportunity for people to break off into smaller discussions (you know I liked that part!) about successes and challenges. She mentioned that their upcoming webinar is going to be co-presented by a teenager who helped develop the library’s PC reservation system! Then I finished with an overview of some of the great tech tools and best practices to come out of WebJunction, including TechAtlas and some of the brainstorms and action planning tools from the Rural Library Sustainability Project. My overall message was about how we need to stop reinventing the wheel and to bring unlikely collaborators into the work of technology planning and maintenance. I reminisced about when technology in the library involved signing patrons up to use the one branch PC to type resumes, in the day when the 3 typewriters in the neighboring carrels were still far more popular. Now our jobs are driven by technology inside and outside of the library, and we need to be accountable to our communities as stewards of that technology. We need to “pull open the circle” and recognize those in our library staff, our trustees, and our broader communities who have a role to play in keeping our computers up and running.

I have to say that the collaborative experience of developing and presenting with this panel, as with the 2.0 Cafe, made me feel even more excited to come back home and continue the work of getting ready to launch the next WJ platform. I can’t wait to pull open the circle of WJ!