Thing #7 Something technology related…

Technology, how we handle information, how we pass it along…it has changed quite a bit since starting this job. So I’ll share a transaction I had with a customer the other day.

Customer: Hey can you help me download a book?

Now as many of us have experienced while working with the public, oftentimes the way a customer phrases a request can be off the mark. Is he really downloading a book? Is he simply trying to place a loan request? Perhaps he found the OverDrive link from our website and really is downloading a book. What the heck, let’s jump in and see what he’s doing.

Me: I can certainly try. Are you on one of our computers? Can you show me what you’re working on?

Customer: I’m doing this for my wife. On Oprah I’m supposed to be able to download this guy’s book.

Our customer has several windows open on his desktop including Yahoo Instant Messenger and the Oprah Winfrey website.

To make a long story short, it turns out that our customer received an IM from his wife about a guest just featured on the Oprah show. Her IM states that the guest’s new book is temporarily available for download on the Oprah website. So we poke around for a minute and find the portion of the page devoted to today’s episode. Sure enough there is a link to download the featured book.

Customer: Can we save this so I can take it with me?

Me: It’s an entire book so I don’t know if the whole file can be saved to a disk.

I find an online tool to convert the file size listed in Kilobytes to Megabytes listed on the floppy disks we sell. It looks like it will work so for $1.00 he is in business. We download the book and I explain that the file is in PDF format. He’s not quite sure what that is, but assures me his wife will know and returns to his IM window to give her the details.

I remember the days of our Library Channel computers which were to be used for “information NOT communication.” Customers were to use the PCs for research and information gathering while we were somehow supposed to curtail their use of email and chat. At some point CML figured out that, for better or worse, people use computers beyond our narrow intention of having them for subject based information gathering.

We have gone from telling customers not to “chat” on our computers to having a customer responding to a real time request from his wife via IM about a book he can download and save just 5 minutes after her favorite show has gone off the air.

It used to be that our middle age to older customers needed help figuring out how to work a mouse or open an internet browser window. Now they are busy downloading books…

Thing # 6 3rd party Flickr sites

Here is a fun mapping site via Flickr.
I made two maps. (Hopefully there's extra credit.)

States where I have lived:

States I have visited: