The latest tech news in the Walker Management Library, for the first week of October 2004.

1)  Elaine's new computer has been installed (finally!). 

2) If you have one of those new little wireless mice, remember that it gets lonely if left out at the reference desk at night.  So don't forget to take it with you on your way back to your office.  And don't forget to put it to sleep (turn it off) each night when you leave. 

3) There is a chill in the air, and it's not the change of seasons!  Deep Freeze has arrived, and Danny and I have been experimenting with it and trying to understand it.  What is it?  

"Deep Freeze instantly protects and preserves original computer configurations. Completely invulnerable to hacking, Deep Freeze makes computing environments easier to manage and maintain. Each restart eradicates all changes and resets the computer to its original state, right down to the last byte." 

I'll be able to maintain the public workstations from my office.  (How cool is that?!?)  Soon, our public workstation nightmares will be over!

4) We are still learning about Ariel.  Laura and I have signed up for the Ariel listserve, and we are reading about document delivery and how the program works.  I am researching recommended scanners by Ariel and trying to figure out why the HP 5000 series one doesn't want to work with Laura's computer.  Ariel recommends HP 7000 series scanners.

5) The new website is coming along nicely.  I hope to show folks some pages of what it will look like in a few weeks after I get a whole section of it done.  I hope you'll be impressed!  It will be XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0 compliant, and will be using PHP includes.  I have also been testing it in Bobby to make sure it's mostly ADA compliant.  (You don't need to know what all this means, but know that it's important and it's good that I care about standards!)

6) I talked with Jason of Owen IT, and he's going to give me a copy of SQL Enterprise Manager.  What is this?  It's a piece of software (sort of) that will allow me to build and maintain a SQL database in this Windows environment.  In other words, I'll be able to build that database of electronic resources to make our site more database-driven and easier to maintain.

7) Outlook Training has been CANCELED for Monday.  After much thought, I will be scheduling short meetings with each of you to make sure we're all on the same page.  I'll configure your Outlook calendar so you'll be able to view everyone else's calendar, view the ref/circ calendar, view the instruction calendar, propose/accept/decline meetings, etc.  Some of you have this already set up, some don't.  I just thought that since we all don't have laptops, and this can be kind of complicated to set up, it might be better if I just set it up on your own computer, and then show you how to do the various things.  I'll put together a handout for reference before I meet with you so you can refer back to it later.

8) You should have received by now an email to our PowerPoint Training sessions for the next  two weeks.  We have invited librarians from Peabody, too, so we may have a good turnout.  It should be educational as well as fun!   

Have a good weekend, everyone! Thanks for your attention and time!