Monday, March 07, 2005

Wired magazine notes library audiobook program

The ever-astute Wendy McGinnis, Director of PR for OCLC, sent me this clip from Wired magazine: Library Shuffles Its Collection.

It's a program from the South Huntington Public Library on Long Island, New York.

This program is cool for so many reasons. South Huntington Public has been able to:
1. Attract the attention of national technology media outlet. Awesome.
2. Make creative use of existing commerical resources. The library saw what they wanted in the consumer marketplace and adapted it for library use. Score two for creativity. What's that old saying? Improvise, adapt and overcome.
3. Put devices in people's hands. So there's only 10 devices. So what? It gives people a chance to experiment with new technology, new devices with no risk. No risk significantly lowers the barriers to community adoption.

So kudos to the library director who said, "Hey, let's try it. What's the worst that can happen? We have 10 iPod Shuffles that don't circulate. Big deal, I'll take the risk."
***
NB. I'm not even going to shamelessly toot our own horn about our Downloadable Audiobooks program. Nope. No tooting here! :)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There is also a brief interview on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" with Ken Weil, the library's Director at

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4521427

or

http://tinyurl.com/5cbwf