Sarah the Librarian

My first week back from maternity leave and I'm already getting philosophical ... One of the big projects I was working on before my maternity leave was a patron survey on technology. The survey ran while I was on leave and we just got the reports back from the group that created the survey for us. And my reactions are so mixed ... On the one hand, it's great we were able to collect so much detailed data on our patrons' use of library technology. There's all sorts of fascinating data (such as 85.8%  of our patrons feel public library internet access is either important or very important to the community) that we can now easily share with the Board and other stakeholders. On the other hand, there's some pretty strong evidence that this was not a representative sample of our community and is likely missing representation from the heaviest users of library technology. While I love the level of detail of the data collected, it made the survey really  long. Colle...

Awhile ago, I wrote about how I would break up with cable if it weren't for sports. Well, my husband and I decided that we could live without live sports available in our living room, only to stumble across an interesting partial solution: ESPN on XBox Live . Thanks to this, whenever the Cubs are on ESPN we can watch the game live. Of course considering the Cubs season this is probably going to be a less common occurrence. And while I'm on the subject of saying goodbye to cable, this article sums up some of the non-cable options for watching TV and movies available online.

... Live Sporting Events Thanks to Hulu, Netflix, and a handful of other websites I'm able to find the majority of TV shows I care about streaming online mostly for free, or a few for a small monthly fee. My husband and I even gave up cable for awhile and got along great, except we kept finding excuses to go to a local bar to watch baseball and football games. For as much as we spent on beer, we might as well have kept our cable subscription. Now I know there are torrenty ways to download anything I could ever want to watch for free, but I'm at the age where that kind of hackery doesn't hold the same thrill it used to. I just want to watch my shows quickly, easily, and reliably and if I have to pay a small fee to do so, it's not the end of the world. I also think that media providers who don't realize that they could grow their audience (and make more money) if they played nicely with providers like Hulu and Netflix *cough* CBS *cough* CW *cough* premium cable *...