My Parents' Home Town Library Uses Linux and OpenOffice!

I was in the Kalispell Public Library today (or possibly the Flathead County Library, not sure what it's specifically called) in Kalispell, Montana today, to use their Internet. (My parents' Internet is what is called glacial.)

The stations are nice, with options for Internet, Office, etc. I didn't really pay attention to the office stuff til my allotted hour was over, and then I thought--gosh, that Spreadsheet icon is Oddly Familiar.

It was familiar of course because it was the Linux OpenOffice.org icon for spreadsheets. I talked to Katy, the librarian at the reference desk and she said, yes, they use Userful, a workstation setup apparently from a company in Canada.

So I just wanted to mention that, since, yay! open source in my home town library, where I have spent billions of hours. And also of course, if there are any librarians out there looking for a good prefab Linux workstation for public use, I really liked this one. It has a setup for restricting time per workstation per person, was nicely set up, of course, and just generally seemed very nice and workable.

And thirdly, I'm definitely going to contact the company providing the workstations and see if we can work out a deal with bundling some of my workbook content. I've been thinking that I would love to give a site license of my workbooks, if I could get a big enough group of libraries or schools or other groups together.

(And yes, I actually am writing this at 4 in the morning on Wednesday; it's not a prefab that I set up to post early in the morning. Presumably I'll get back to sleep at some point. Sheesh.)

Comments

[Williamts99]

Looks like you are getting some comment spam. You might want to look into implementing CAPCHAS or something like that to help prevent the automated stuff. I am not sure about how you would do it on typepad as I use the Serendipity Weblog System. If you want a translation of the spam, you can go here http://babelfish.altavista.com/ and it will translate it for you from Japanese to English. :-)

[Solveig]

Yeah--it's actually my first comment spam in a while. I did have typepad set up to just hold all comments and trackbacks but then I just thought it would be better for commenters to see stuff immediately. Plus, I've got the CAPCHA thing turned on so... ?? Anyway, have deleted the spam, we'll see what happens.

[Williamts99]

I do like when you can see comments immediately, it gives more of an interactive feeling, and it lessens the burden of having to approve every comment and trackback. Though I think that there might be something wrong with the setup as I have never had to enter a captcha when making a comment to your blog. So that might be something to look into. Even with this one I wasn't presented with a captcha.

[Pablo Cáceres Serrano]

I love your excellent blog. I'm learning so much about OO since I found it, Thanks

Te saludo desde el profundo sur de América (CHILE).

[Solveig]

Pablo,

Thanks! I'm glad it's useful.

Solveig

[shoe]

Go ahead and contact Userful... We have the system at our library and they are the NICEST people on earth to deal with. They're very open to suggestions on how to improve the product, which is already really good.

take care
shoe