Hi Everyone! Just sharing an idea.. Wanted to share with you our latest tech project here at Otsego District Library in case it might be helpful to other folks in library land - I know some of you already have done this too but some might be interested in the idea - We created touchscreen card catalogs. I did this at my former library also about 4 years ago and the touch screen technology has come a long way since then. They are working really great. I was inspired by the digital endcaps at the Nashville Public Library but we could not afford the product they used. We created our own version of this at 1/20th the cost. I am pretty excited how they turned out and they are working great so far with our catalog! We used 27 inch ACER monitors and flipped and mounted them vertically. We used a very small processor - The Dell Micro PC 3000 Series - and put it on the bottom shelf behind the endcap. We drilled a hole through the endcap for the cords. Verso/Auto-graphics is our card catalog. We added 3 widgets to the bottom of our Verso homepage to make scrolling covers of New Books, New Movies, and New Audiobooks. We set up the computers to have a screensaver showing slides that advertise our programs when people are not using the catalog. They work just like a smart phone - you can shrink and enlarge the text the same way as on an IPhone, and a keyboard pops up when you click in the text bars. Nick Heimler, Heimler Consulting, does our technology and he helped me find just what I was looking for - I wanted something large and thin. He installed them for us and set them up to display vertically. When we removed our old catalog stands, our maintenance man put trim pieces to match the endcaps up to cover where they had been screwed to the endcaps, and built a fence to match the other endcaps in our children's area. It turned out really nice. We have been getting a lot of positive patron comments on them and the kids and teens especially like using them. Thought it was a cool idea to share. Before and after pictures attached! Have a great day, Andrea Andrea Estelle, MLIS Library Director Otsego District Library Brighten the Corner Where You Are Every Great Community Deserves a Great Library www.otsegolibrary.org <http://www.otsegolibrary.org/>
