 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, a webcast, an online show. As I say often the terminology is up for debate and discussion, but whatever you want to call us we are here live online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, so if you do have any friends or colleagues you think might be interested in any of our topics we have coming up please just let them know they can they can join us. We do record the show every week so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings that's fine you can always go to our website and see the recordings of all of our shows there and I'll show you that at the end of the end of this session so you can see where our upcoming sessions are and what all our recordings are on there. We do a mixture of things here, book reviews, mini training sessions, interviews, demos. Basically our only criteria is anything if it's library related we are happy to have it on the show. We have a Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes come on and do presentations about things going on here in Nebraska and are at the Library Commission, but we also do bring in guest speakers and that's what we have this morning. On the line from us is Alex Lent. Good morning Alex. Good morning, thanks for having me. Yeah and he is on the east coast. He is a director, the library director at the Millis Public Library in Massachusetts. Millis is I say that right? Millis, Massachusetts. Yeah and he's got a program he's been doing at his library as you can see if you're from his you know introsite site here. A lot of many libraries do are lending out laptops and tablets and all sorts of different kind of equipment to their patrons and users and he started a program using Linux as opposed to other ones you might get have done so he's going to tell us all about that so I'll just hand over to you to take it away. Great, well hi thank you for having me. I'm Alex Lent and I'm delighted to be here. This is a really cool thing that you do. Thank you. I'm watching the older episodes online. Oh great. Thank you for thinking of me and thanks for your interest in this topic. It has had a big impact on my library and I think it could have a big impact on some of Nebraska's libraries as well so I am director of the Millis Public Library in Massachusetts. Millis is a town of about 8,000 people so we're what the ALA refers to as a very small public library which seems a little bit like a derogatory term but it's just a library that serves less than 10,000 people. And we have a lot of those here in Nebraska and in the Midwest as well so we know exactly what you're talking about. Not derogatory at all. Right and you know the ALA could just as accurately refer to these libraries as the standard public library because nearly 60% of public libraries in the United States do serve populations of less than 10,000 people. And yeah I took a look at the the NLC data and it looks like the overwhelming majority of your libraries are sort of similar to mine which is which is great. It makes me hopeful that the project I'm going to talk about today might work well in Nebraska as well. So I'm here to so this is a little bit about me if you feel free to tag me on your tweets if you have questions. I'm probably not going to be able to look at them but we can start a conversation afterwards as well. So I'm here to talk about public access technology. This is a project we started just about a year ago and it's greatly improved the patron computing we have in NILIS. So the typical public access computer is a desktop computer. I'd say that close to 100% of libraries that have public access computers have desktop computers. If we do an image search for library computers I'm using duck duck go here not Google and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. If you do an image search for library computers you get dozens and dozens of photos of desktop computers organized more often than not in large banks like this one here in New Jersey. So there are a few reasons patron computers tend to be desktops and tend to be organized in banks but they really boil down to cost. Desktops have traditionally been less expensive than equivalent laptops and putting them in groups makes it easier to manage them because you can have one staff person in charge of all of the computers in your library. So if one person has a question they're right there. If someone else has a question they're still right there. It's also easier because if you need to install power outlets or network ports when you're getting your computers it's way cheaper to install them in one spot rather than in numerous spots throughout the building. So we have desktop computers in Millis too and we also organize them in banks we have 14 computers total eight here in this adult area and this is sort of a bank and three each in the teen and children's areas but now we also have laptops this is one of our laptops and they've been a really great addition. So today my mission is to convince you of three things first that laptops are better than desktops when it comes to patron computing. Two that Linux is a good option for libraries in fact I think it's almost obligatory for libraries to use Linux but that's outside the scope of this presentation and I'm very happy to talk about that in a little bit. And three and this is probably the most important one to me this project really isn't that hard. Before I started working on this I didn't know how to do most of the things I'm going to talk about here. When I had a question I looked for answers online and I deliberately chose solutions that were easy because I have some technology skills but I'm in no way a guru. I'm also I'm in charge of technology at my library but I'm also in charge of adult services and I'm the library director so a big part of my job is managing my time so that I can take care of all the different tasks assigned to me. So with this project I needed systems that would work and wouldn't take too much work it had to be pretty easy. So I really do believe that you even if you don't think you're a techie you can probably handle this project. So what is this project? This is the Linux laptops for libraries project and it started when we noticed that we're really busy. We have a new building now it's about three times larger than our last building but we're having far more foot traffic far more circulation all of our numbers are up this is just what happens when you have a new building and desk space is at a particular premium so it would be useful for us to provide more computers for patrons to use so we wouldn't have to turn people away but sometimes people want a desk to do not computer work on sometimes people bring their own computers to the library sometimes people don't need to use a computer all they just need a desk to do homework or paperwork or to have a meeting or just to sit at actually there was a not long ago and they did the paperwork to buy their house in town at one of our desks which was kind of cool so we didn't want to increase the number of computers in such a way that we also had to decrease the number of desks that we have available for patrons to use because those are two needs and they're overlapping but they're not they're not the same need. We also saw groups of patrons often not all but not always students trying to work together at one computer so they're trying to get their work done and to collaborate but they're also trying to keep their voices down so they don't irritate the people at other computers who just want quiet and this this situation wasn't working for anyone because you can't be quiet enough that you don't irritate people and still be loud enough to have a conversation and we also saw people camped for long periods of time at our desktops watching movies or playing video games this is fine in terms of our policy but they're hunched over the desktop and they would probably be more comfortable on a couch with their feet up or in a big comfy chair. So the physical limitations of desktops were a problem and this is what put us on this journey to get Linux laptops. Other spaces in the library were also being ignored because they didn't come with computers and people wanted computers so we have lots of spaces we have a couple small study rooms that can fit up to three people we have these we call these cubbies they're by our fiction section they're very quiet it's a good place to work we have these are sort of traditional reference tables this used to be our reference section but now it's our biography section and we have several living room type spaces we also have some work tables in our teen room so our stationary computers were meeting our technology needs but not our physical needs we thought to ourselves wouldn't it be great if we could just have computers that that we can move from place to place we briefly contemplated just moving our existing desktop computers into different configurations but we realized that that would just push the problem back a little bit wouldn't it be great if we could put groups of people together in one one group room and give them computers if they needed computers in the same room we could also put people who want pure or quiet then they can get in our open floor plan so we could satisfy both groups and individuals if we could just let them move where they wanted to move we could also let people use computers in a way that's comfortable for them i know that when i'm working at home i'm rarely sitting at my desk you know i'm usually on my couch or my kitchen table or in my kitchen cooking while on the internet so we really wanted to let people use computers in the way they wanted to use them so this project started as a response to space issues not because our previous computer system was lacking or so we could offer computer classes or so we could have an after school code camp or even so we can have minecraft parties that we do have all of those now we just wanted mobile computers and we realized after considering our options that we really needed six things we wanted a system with a high degree of flexibility usability affordability privacy security and we also needed a system that was what i call data which just means would give us the usage data that we need in order to complete our reports and figure out how often our computers are being used so we're going to move through this list and address each item on its own so flexibility and usability together that told us laptops because we liked our desktop computers we just needed to be able to move them so we figured out that what we wanted on a laptop was something that was as close to a desktop as possible we wanted a large screen preferably hd we wanted a full keyboard which to us meant keys that were normal sizes and also a keyboard that had a full number pad we wanted a camera so that people could Skype we wanted to have a cd and dvd player so people could play movies and listen to music we wanted lots of usb ports that we could plug these computers into printers or to scanners or into anything that we think of later including just thumb drives we wanted at least four gigs of ram so four gigs is really the minimum amount of ram that's acceptable these days in a new computer it used to be two a lot of our older computers have about two gigs of ram and in a few years it'll probably go up to eight but we wanted at least four we thought we could get away with four we also wanted a decent processor but we weren't expecting people to be doing high levels of computer programming or playing resource intense video games so you know a middle of the road kind of office work computer processor would have been fine we also wanted an ssd which is a solid state drive rather than a hard drive because a solid state drive as name implies is a solid chunk of material whereas a hard drive is sort of like a record it spins and is more susceptible to damage than a solid data but we didn't care how much space was available because we weren't going to be letting people save files to these computers but we did want decent battery life because we didn't want to go through the hassle of circulating power cords with these and we wanted five laptops and the reason for that is that we really wanted to dive right into this program and we wanted to have a natural replacement cycle with these computers so we wanted to get five laptops in 2015 five in 2016 and continue that for the next two years and then in 2019 start thinking about replacing or upgrading the laptops and five was enough that it would really have an impact that's five more laptops five more computers is a big deal when you only have 14 and our budget was 300 dollars per computer this is not a lot of money and it's also a very specific amount of money and that's because as we approached the end of fiscal year 15 we realized that we were going to have about 1500 dollars left over in our operations budget that we could use really in any way but if we didn't use it we would have to give it back to the town so we decided to launch our computer program project right away so we bought five of these computers this is a Toshiba satellite C5-5 it's essentially an entry-level computer it costs about 250 dollars on amazon amazon is really great because it has a very useful computer search method so you can really tell it exactly what you're looking for and it will give you just the options that match this so this has a nice big HD screen it's 15.6 inches it has a nice full keyboard as you can see it has four gigs of RAM it has a fine processor it matched all of our criteria except it doesn't have a solid state drive it has a hard drive but good enough close enough to what we needed so we bought five of them and we had enough money left over to buy five of these wireless mice and we also have five noise reducing headphones that you can check out as well so once we had these laptops we had settled the first three criteria we had a flexible and usable system that is a real computer that you can move anywhere and it didn't break the bank so now we're going to look at privacy and security they're related privacy is essentially if patron one is using a computer and does their taxes and logs off and patron two logs on they shouldn't be able to see patron one's taxes security on the other hand is essentially protecting the computer and its systems from the patron or from viruses that may be accidentally downloaded or from changes the patron may have made to the settings to suit their needs so both of these in large extent both of these items are achieved by something called pharaonic's deep freeze or a similar program this is a program that takes a picture of your computer and its systems in its ideal state and saves that so when you log out it erases everything you've done to the computer and restores it to that perfect state the thing about deep freeze and it's a great program though a little bit tricky sometimes it's a great program but it costs money and by this time we were out of money we only had that $1,500 so we needed to figure out another way to make this work we needed to achieve privacy and security and to do so for free and this is when we turn to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux it's a version of Linux it's not an alternative to deep freeze it's an alternative to windows or Apple it's an operating system and this is sort of what sets our laptops apart from a lot of other laptops that libraries are using because it's it's Linux it's an open source system and I just want to make it clear that the reason we went with Linux it has a lot of great things going for it it's open source it's got a great community around it you can do great things with it but it's also free and that's what really did it for us and it comes packaged with something called a temporary guest session so when you log in as a guest this screen appears and there's this little pop-up that says all the data created during this guest session will be deleted when you log out and settings will be reset to their default please save files on some external device a USB stick if you would like to access them again later so this is perfect this is exactly what we wanted to have happen with deep freeze patreon logs in they do what they need to do and they log out and the computer wipes everything that they've done and alex that's an automatic thing that comes with it that's not something like deep freeze some extra you have to get it just comes with correct yeah that's nice that's really what took us over the edge yeah you know i've i've always sort of liked linux i think philosophically it's a great choice for libraries because it's it's affordable and we know it's pretty secure because the data the source code you can read it so you can know that there's nothing you know evil lurking in there but this is a really great reason for us to take the leap and go for linux in a public library a lot of people have been afraid of it but when you don't have any money and you need to do this this is a perfect solution so the thing about this though was if you look to the left of the screen here you see a lot of icons the top one is sort of like your start menu in windows the second one is your file system so if you want to go to my documents for example the next one is mozilla firefox it's a browser the next three are an office system and the one below that with an a followed by the next one with an a it's to get new software for your computer and the next one is amazon and then you have the little gear with the wrench that's your setting and then the one right below is just this message that's popped up so i didn't want patrons to have access to all of that i didn't want them to be able to go into the software folder and i didn't want them to have to go to amazon this way it sort of feels like an advertisement and i definitely didn't want them to have settings right there if they wanted to change something i'd rather them talk to the staff but typically they haven't needed to go into settings so i didn't i didn't want to make it available to them i wanted it as simple as possible so i would log in as a guest and i would change things and i would want those icons to go away but then i would log back out and log back in and of course they would go back because that's the whole point of the temporary guest session so i did some digging on google i googled it because i i still had to make this work because we had the computers a bunch of was on them we didn't have any money to really make any changes so we had to make it work so i found out that you can customize a guest session and that sounded good but it required terminal commands so terminal is sort of the back end of the system it's your writing and code and you're telling it what to do in a specific computer language that i had no experience with at all so this really made me nervous i was feeling like this i've made this a an unacceptable solution for my library that i need this high degree of technical information but some friendly person on the internet had put instructions online so all i had to do was a little bit more googling and then i found a nice little walkthrough and it's about five steps long so first step create a new administrative user and name them guest press you can name them anything you want but guest press is what we chose so you just go into user account under your settings tab it's two clicks away and you just add a new user the same way you would you would on your phone or on an ipad or on windows or mac it's the same thing if you just create that new user then you log in as that user and you change all the things that you want to change so if you don't want amazon to be on there you take it off in guest press and you do all the changes right there then oh okay so i forgot about this slide so this is what happens when you open a guest session and i wanted to get rid of those things right at the bottom so if you look at the left you can see it was all these things i wanted to get rid of them so i went into guest press and i i got rid of them so then once you've done that you open terminal and enter these crazy strings of letters so they now make sense to me because i sort of i've entered them so often but at the time they were complete gobbledygook and that's fine because it still works because the computer knows what it means so you just enter these and that's it this makes the guest session mirror the new user you've just created so if you want your patrons to log on and see a desktop pattern that shows your logo for instance you can just go into guest press put the um the desktop pattern on guest press and log out and then the guest session will have that logo on the desktop and you can do more intricate changes as well i haven't really done many of them um but this is the way to make any changes to the guest session it took me about an hour to figure it out and then it took me about 10 minutes to set it up on all the computers it was very easy it was painless so guest session gives us this level of privacy and security that we would have had to use deep freeze for so deep freeze is a deeper solution than what we've done but it's a sufficient solution for our purposes we also decided to add a little bit more security by going into the bios the bios um sort of called firmware it's what's on your computer even if you don't have an operating system it it controls the base hardware of your computer and you get to the bios setup on most computers you you turn on your computer and you just press f2 and it will bring you right here and if i wanted to mess up someone's computer i would go to bios and i would change all the settings and it would it would totally mess them up so i could for instance tell the computer to instead of booting from the hard drive boot from my thumb drive and i could install a new operating system that would totally mess up the computer i didn't want people to be able to do that so we just entered a password for the bios and that gave us another layer of security so we protected patrons from losing their information to each other and we've protected the computer to a sufficient degree from deliberate tampering in this way locking the bios yeah it protected us against deliberate tampering if you still wanted to mess up this computer and you really knew what you were doing you could still do that but you can do that on any computer so this is just some basic steps we could take to protect these computers we want to add a bit more privacy and to do so without using any money to our browser and we could do that with free browser add-on so we added we use mozilla firefox it's a great open source browser i think it's probably the best browser out there chrome gives it gives it a bit of a run for its money but chrome is extremely proprietary so chrome and firefox are both secure and that they're not going to you know be robbed essentially they're not going to get hacked probably but the difference between chrome and mozilla is that mozilla isn't really collecting data on you but but google is google is collecting data from chrome so i like mozilla it works really well and it comes pre-packaged with linux so you don't have to install it but we put on privacy badger privacy badger is an add-on that blocks spying ads and invisible trackers you might be spied on by corporations or by hackers or i suppose by government organizations and this prevents that or helps prevent that we also added another program or another add-on called https everywhere so http stands for hypertext hypertext transfer protocol and the s stands for secure it just adds a layer of encryption to everything you do on the web and so we added that we have a lot of ebay shoppers in millis and so this protects them a little bit and it was free so that we had no reason not to we also switched the default search engine from google to duck duck go you can sort of think of you know chrome is to mozilla as google is to duck duck go they're both search engines but duck duck go doesn't track you and google makes most of its money off advertisements and it it does a good job of that because it tracks you so an example of the difference between these two is that if you look up home depot on google it'll give you directions from your house to the closest home depot and if you look it up on duck duck go it'll bring you to home depot.com so it's certainly convenient to get those directions right away but it's sort of creepy to know that it knows exactly where you are it also does this cool thing so if if you google download macafe macafe is a antivirus protection program in google it gives you three ads right at the top the first one is from macafe.com and then the bottom one is macafe.office.com and then the one in between is macafe-antivirus-download.com which is a pretty sketchy url i don't i wouldn't recommend anyone go to that middle one maybe to the top one maybe to the bottom one but definitely not the middle one it doesn't seem safe if you do the same thing okay i showed a different search here but if you search something in duck duck go it'll find the official site and it will put a little label there that says this is the official site and so if people are looking to download things you know they could be downloading programs to use they'll be erased shortly after or if they're downloading documents or other things they could very well download something they don't want to download privacy duck duck go will tell them when they're in a safe spot and we like that and since i've looked this up i can say privacy badger is created by the EFF that's the electronic frontier foundation it's sort of like the ACLU of the internet so we created privacy badger and it created HTTPS everywhere they're both great reliable products another thing and just because i'm talking to a bunch of librarians i'll mention this duck duck go has some cool tricks up its sleeve so if you type in dewy and history or dewy and satire it'll give you dewy call numbers that have to do with those topics which is really handy if you're at the front desk and someone asks you a question and you need a broad answer i find this pretty helpful wow were librarians involved in creating duck duck go i don't think they were actually but you know nice i think it's dewy.info has been down for years now yes yeah i know i've seen a lot of people having it yeah worry they want it back yeah it was very handy especially you know i have a great iLS at my library but occasionally it's kind of slow and duck duck go is faster so if i need to do a quick search that's much easier for me while we were messing around with firefox we decided to change a couple other things for instance one of the problems we see most often is a patron will download something you know a document and then they can't find it so they come to the desk and say i just i just saved this where did it go and it it goes to the my documents folder by default depending on the computer you're using but we decided to change it so that everything you download goes right to the desktop because people know how to find the desktop so that has made things a lot easier so between these five things i put a little asterisk at usability we'll talk about that in a little bit we have a flexible usable affordable relatively private and relatively secure system now we need a data system oh i guess we're going to talk about the asterisk first so one thing that we don't have on these laptops is microsoft office which is probably the most requested program any library has again microsoft office costs money and we had run out but we still wanted to satisfy our patron's needs so we turned to Libre office which is a sort of a microsoft office clone that comes with linux it's a great program i use it personally and i love it so it has a document creation well has essentially word excel powerpoint access and publisher i think i never used anything but the top three um the thing about it is that it uses different file formats microsoft office uses dot doc and other proprietary format and by default Libre office uses dot odf which is open document format and in the past there have been some real issues about conversion sometimes it's difficult for Libre office to open a dot doc and it was definitely difficult for microsoft office to open Libre office files it just wouldn't work but again we didn't have any money to buy microsoft office and we needed to make this work so i did some more googling and i found out that if i went into Libre office and i went to tools and selected options i went to always save as i could just tell Libre office to always use microsoft office formats for no money um we can have Libre office basically think that it's microsoft office and i thought this was far too good to be true so i used one of these laptops as my work laptop exclusively for two weeks and i never had a single conversion issue even though i was using um Libre office's version of word and of powerpoint powerpoint and of excel very importantly i was using excel and i never had any problems so a few years ago that wouldn't have been possible but now it really is the conversion issue has really um gone away for the most part while we were messing around with Libre office we wanted to do the same thing that we did for firefox so we went back into tools women to options and women to path and we told it to instead of saving to my documents to also set save to the desktop so now everything that a patron is going to be doing on these computers will be based around the desktop our browser is on the desktop our office suite is on the desktop and now all the files will be on the desktop too so they don't have to go hunting around which is really great so now we have achieved these five items so now we're on to data and what i mean by that is usage statistics i don't want to know where people have been going on the internet i don't want to know how often they're using you know Libre office word rather than its version of excel that doesn't really matter to me so much but i do want to know how many times the computers are used in a year because in massachusetts we have to report that it's important to um you know to assess our our libraries value essentially so we wanted a way to find out how to um to do that so traditionally this is done by having patrons have to log into the computer with their library card so they would enter their library card into computer it would connect to a server that would check that um number against your i l s so it's a is this the right person and if it wasn't it would say try again and if it say okay come on in and then if i wanted that information i would have to log into that server and download that information and that's sort of a pain and it's an expensive pain i would have to come up with an authentication system for these laptops and i would have to connect them to our i l s which is on its own network so i'd have to do this whole bridging situation so instead i just slapped a barcode on them and i added them to our i l s so now um when someone wants one of these laptops they hand their card to a staff member the staff member scans their card gives them back their card scans the computer and gives them the computer and when i want um when i want that usage data i can just download it from my i l s it's very simple this cost no money and um it was incredibly easy it was very satisfying when we figured this out because it was a huge problem and we managed to get around it for no money and very little effort so those are our six items and um we feel pretty good about it so now um we did this in fiscal year 15 we're in fiscal year 16 we were able to already buy those laptops and probably over the summer we're going to buy the next five um which is really great and so now um we're seeing people using these laptops all over the building the teens love them um they love them so much that we're thinking about moving their desktops out of their teen room and just giving them more empty desk space so they can use the laptops more exclusively and we're also able to turn our program room which is essentially a big empty room into a computer lab in about two minutes which is really great we were able to offer computer classes resume workshops we're able to have a code camp we're actually having one this saturday and we're able to have minecraft parties which is really exciting it's a great way to get teens in the building and we weren't able to do any of that without laptops so we're on this path we're going to get five more and hopefully five more after that and we'll have 20 and that will really fill up our program room we'll have a nice big computer lab when we need it and then in 2019 we're going to think about replacing or upgrading our fiscal year 15 laptops and typically uh if you have the money to do it it's a good idea to replace computers or upgrade computers after about three years and i'm pretty confident that we're going to get at least four years out of these laptops and that's because windows uses more computing power than a bunch who does so if i had windows 10 on these laptops three years from now it would really be struggling i think to run windows windows sort of builds up errors over time and windows will have an upgrade to windows that will require more power even than the power listed here but Ubuntu is fairly consistently light so Ubuntu will last on these laptops longer than windows would so i'm pretty confident we'll get four or five years out of these laptops barring someone dropping them which hasn't happened so now um this is our program room we can put laptops in it we can have classes really easily here i'm set up to give an introduction to our e-library um the class hadn't started yet just just know that people did come um and we're able to use them all over the building so what would i do differently if i were looking back on it well i would not buy wireless mice they're really a pain in the neck they have to have this little hub that you plug into the usb and that hub will only work on a specific mouse so if you have two mice and you mix them up it's really a pain to track them down and if someone um well they also they use batteries and the batteries go out all the time especially if you accidentally leave the mouse on you just drain your batteries all the time so it's a huge pain in the neck we wanted to avoid wires but i think it wasn't worth it we would just get wired mice going forward i would also use Ubuntu LTS which is um every six months Ubuntu releases a new updated version of it so people who are sort of power users can always have the latest version but most people's needs are met by having um one version for two years that's the LTS the long term so i didn't do that i used 14 uh 1504 which was the latest version at the time and now it's out of date and um i think that was a mistake because i'm going to have to upgrade those all so i'm going to upgrade to the LTS and that will be good for two years um so our next steps this is what i'm talking about uh each version of Ubuntu has a little animal associated with it um 1610 i think that's what we're about to go to or 1604 is the long term service it has a little squirrel so we're going to be upgrading to the squirrel one i'm also going to play around with accessibility linux does does have some things built into it that will help people who are low vision or low hearing um use the computers so i'm going to play around with that i'm going to see if i can add a second guest session and that one would be for people who you know want accessibility services turned on and i am going to continue to think about adding word to this we haven't had anyone complain that we don't have word but i think we are still getting people who are a little bit more adventurous using the laptops um than the people who are comfortable using the desktops exclusively um it used to be quite difficult to add word to linux you have to use a program called wine which was sort of a layer that would make linux pretend it was windows and then you would so you would turn wine on and then inside wine wine would turn office on and it was the slow tricky thing to use and it was always a few years out of date um but now there's a program called play on linux which uses wine but it adds a front end to it and it makes it much easier to install word so i installed word on my own computer as a test because i actually prefer labor office using play on linux and um it took me 10 minutes to install it was much easier so i think we we will experiment with that if we have the funds for it um we've also been doing setups and updates manually laptop by laptop the first time i did one of these setups it took me about an hour for one laptop and after that it took me about 30 minutes per laptop and most of that was just waiting around um and now that we're set up i can update all of the computers in one go simply by turning them all on and standing in front of them and it takes me about half an hour to do all of them so that's not too bad but it would be convenient to just have to set up one computer and have it set up all the other computer so we can use something like clone zilla that will do that for us um you can also related just to updates i could train my staff to run the updates for me but i have a small staff a very busy staff and i really want these computers to be self-contained so i'd like to do something like ansible which will automatically update your computers this is much higher level work setting ansible up i essentially set up these laptops the way you would set up your own laptop just to work individually and that made it very easy to set these up ansible i would have to sort of connect them to this cloud-based system if you're interested in that chuck mcandrew from the lebanon new hampshire library um wrote a piece on how to do this and he did i think a much more sophisticated job setting up his linux system than i did here um that wasn't an accident chuck has much greater tech skills than i do but he's also in a much larger library and his job is i believe it entirely technology and my job is only a little bit technology so i need a system that would work without a dedicated technologist but if you're interested in that this is a great resource here i'm also going to be looking into time management systems for these laptops um libki is an open source kiosk management system where you would log in with your library card um you can also have it managed for you so we're going to look into that i would also really like to have a laptop vending machine or automatic checkout we have self-checkout machines here but we don't use them for the laptops you have to actually talk to a staff member to get the laptops and we've gotten feedback from our teams that um you know sometimes they don't want to interact with the scary staff members they just want to be self-contained to get their laptop and do their work as they need which i think is a reasonable thing so this is something that we're going to look into and then we're going to immediately find out that it's far far too expensive for us but we might be able to figure something out i'd also like to circulate laptops outside of the library we circulate a lot of weird things at the library we have lego sets and raspberry pies and sewing machines and ukuleles and all sorts of things we actually just got a rumba the other day so it's a little robot vacuum that people can try out at home and i think we really need to to circulate laptops because we do have a small population that doesn't have computers at home and i think this would really be useful and it's not too expensive um we're also still working on our minecraft program so we are having minecraft parties but we don't currently let people we don't have minecraft installed on these individual computers all the time so we're we're gonna have to figure that out i think that would be a really great thing so that's that's it for me i i hope people find this useful and i hope they they start using Linux laptops there are a couple libraries near us that have started after talking to us and i think it's a really great thing it's an affordable easy way to really improve your patron technology and it lets you get much more out of your limited space than desktop computers do so thanks for listening and i do have a quick start guide up on my website alexland.org go free to check that out and feel free to talk to me on twitter if you have any questions thanks great okay um thanks alex uh yes and so so everyone knows as you are going through your presentation as i do every week um i've been grabbing all the ones all the websites that you've mentioned all the resources and things that have websites grabbing them to save all of their links in when we do the recording up for you guys later so um hopefully i've got all of them i didn't miss any i'll check again later so you'll have access to that uh let's see we do have a few questions about about this uh i had a question about using the laptops i know some people do have um don't like using laptops because of their size um the specifically the keyboard being um smaller um first for people with larger hands um have you had any issues with that i mentioned the mouse thing that you actually did get separate mice which i think is great because i personally don't like touch pads they drive me baddie right um we um i had one patron in mind who really wants as quiet a space as she can possibly get uh i thought they would be a great candidate to take a laptop in a mouse and go into a study room and that really um that didn't interest this patron at all they they like the really big computer and they like the full size a keyboard um so we have you know the the computers we got do have um the sort of standard large size screen it's 15.6 inches which is pretty comfortable and they do have the full size keyboard or as full size as a laptop can get but um yeah we have had you know one person who wasn't interested based on size no not bad so not not bad we get about 20 000 uses of our computers a year so you know we have one one person uh not like them that's okay well it's not okay but it's pretty good yeah um and you did mention seeking a statistics that you um did the you know the check out the laptops using their computer you know circulation system to track how often they're getting used which totally you know makes sense um but that you didn't want to know of course where are they going on the internet do you have anything though to see um are they using the different services that the programs you've installed on to them to at least to figure out oh are they using office enough or is there something else they're not using that we've put on here do you have anything that you're using to keep track of that kind of information at least just not what they've actually done but what they've clicked on to try and use that kind of usage i think there's probably something we could add um to figure that out but um we don't need it for the reports that we we have to file and it's yeah that's some information that we don't yeah and so your users if they were something that wasn't on there that they wanted they would tell you that's the hope hopefully the ones that aren't afraid of the scary librarians right yeah so we have gotten some feedback um that way we got that sort of through the grapevine you know the people who spoke to our children's librarian who spoke to me and so we're trying to figure that out but yeah that that is the hope and it's sort of a passive way to figure this out which is unfortunate yeah we are going to be launching a sort of constant set of groups you know not just teen advisory boards but also for all other groups and hopefully we'll be able to talk to them about the things that they would want okay um we do have one question from the audience wanted to know um could you please list again the programs that you can now do use more easily using the laptops like i guess what are the different things you have installed on there do they mean programs or events good question um so i can debbie do you mean they actually like events that they've held like like events yes she means the events yeah actual that kind of programs yeah yeah so we have a monthly computer class and the topic varies so some of the topics are you know basic computing you know computing 101 setting up a facebook account all these sort of things like that we also have classes on using the libraries online resources like overdrive and things like that and the computers have made that easier because some of our our resources are really web-based overdrive is really app-based at this point yeah we also have classes on setting appropriate passwords and we have computer camps so people who want to learn how to you know write computer code we're able to do that now and we do have Minecraft parties which is really exciting yeah we also have resume workshops where we're getting some people in to do that from the local business office and so none of those were at all possible before unless people brought in their own laptops and and some people just don't have laptops so this has made direct instruction a lot easier um yeah i mentioned about um thinking about letting them take these home right now they're just for use in the library correct that's correct right do you do any programs um i suppose i say on the road like taking some of them outside to another another location doing a program elsewhere is everything just done at the library itself right now everything's done at the library um when i came here we had not enough programming happening so the first step we took was to just really beef up our our in-house stuff but i think there is an opportunity to go to some organizations and do classes especially now that you have the laptops are way more portable yeah it wouldn't have been possible at all before that but no now it is potential yeah yeah um we do have another question that just came in um can you say a little bit more about how an accessibility guest session would differ from the current regular guest sessions when they switched to that sure yes so um there are options where you can have well basically everything bigger and you can also have icons the high contrast and you can have the computer speak to you i'm not an expert in accessibility but this is um early days for me in knowing about this um and we do have the Perkins school in massachusetts which works with low vision people i would if we do move forward on this i'm going to ask them for help but um it's essentially a large screen a large print version and then there are more advanced versions as well so the reason it's tricky is because i know how to set up a single guest session the one that looks sort of like your standard computer i'd want to also offer additional guest sessions so one would be you know the standard look one would be um low vision one would be low hearing you know all sorts of things and i don't know how to set up multiple guest sessions at this point right yeah for accessibility we do that here um to the commission with helping libraries with that um screen viewers that make things bigger um that text text to speech software there is software that you can get that and it does cost i'm sure that we something to look into for something that doesn't cost too much um think that will read off of the screen for people who can't leave in the extreme size of the screens isn't enough for so i believe some of that is available open source oh yeah we could do it for free um and that is something that we're interested in yeah great okay uh let's see any other last minute questions we're almost about five of the eleven here in central time so um we could wrap up anybody have anything anything else that you want to ask before we do end for today because people got some of their questions out while we were chatting which is great and during the show um all are waiting i do get a lot okay no go ahead um a lot of people ask what version of linux we use and i i did mention we use buntu um and we chose that because it's really the biggest most popular version of the buntu of linux the i think linux mint it's another version i think it's better um than a buntu it's much more polished and it's based on a buntu but a buntu is easy to set up and you can have your desktop be very plain and just have exactly what you want on it and so it was very easy for us to go with a buntu so in lebanon they used um mint which i think is a beautiful version i use i use mint personally um but a buntu was very stable and very easy to set up which is why we went with that um we know another question that just came in actually um is our five of these you said you got five now are they actually really enough for your population um or is the idea that after three years of buying five each year you're going to eventually have 15 i mean how is five doing right now we have 10 so we have 10 now okay right at the end of fiscal year 15 okay so you're already on your second year right yeah so we bought five i think just about this time last year and then two months went by and we had a new budget so we bought five more and i'm about to buy uh actually when we when we switch to the next year so in a couple months i'll buy five more and then we'll have 15 so five was not enough now ten is it was okay for the first year because people didn't really know about them at first not enough for our classes and um my long term hope is to really not have a lot of desktop computers because i think you know i really do think the laptops are better we're getting much more out of our building and so that's what i'd like to see in the long run i don't know if that'll really fly with my trustees but some of them still want the traditional yeah and there's like that one patron that doesn't want that wants the big one yeah and i think that's totally reasonable um i think it's possible in a few years we'll be able to maybe go down to 12 desktops or maybe even 10 but we'll see you know we do have our current setup with the bank of computers and it's going pretty well so we're not in desperate need anymore to free up those desks but we'll see and we're going to get up to 20 computers and then we'll we'll reassess um so let's know also do you have have you done anything with tablets or ipads in the library or you just do to have desktops and laptops we have desktops and laptops and then we circulate kindle fires wow okay we have staff ipads to get staff up to speed on them and i i think it would be nice to have more ipads around especially in the the children's room we have a a neighboring library that has done some really great things by just having ipads in their children's room patrons of that age have really responded well they do yeah it's a very they're really great for the kids to learn on they they are all about that touchscreen and they just whiz through that stuff it's easier for them i think the younger they are to do that then trying to use even though the even the children's based computers with the keyboards and whatnot yeah that's exactly right all right any other questions we have um more waiting i'll say yes as i said i've grabbed all the all the links for everyone um alex the slides normally um sometimes we post them along with the recording um would you be okay with that you can either send me them or i can link to somewhere where you have them post on time posted online whichever works for you we're not particular we have a slide share account that we use here that's fine um i can send them to you as well okay no problem all right we'll have the slides afterwards as well for anyone wants to go back and see what he had done here oh oh somebody wants to know which is that library that near you that has the ipads for the kids room uh the dover town library okay which is a very good library there are a few libraries that have them you know i will have them pretty soon yeah but um dover is one of our closest neighbors and i'm i'm happy to brag about them on their behalf yeah that'd be dover massachusetts yeah i think it's dover town library dot org cool all right anything else before we wrap up got a lot of thank yous coming through it's good oh good good you um have any questions later on i'm i'm very accessible on twitter and you can email me at alex.alexlent.org i'm very happy to get to the nitty gritty detail of of this with you right i do think that linux is a great option for libraries it's cheap and it gives you so much control that you really can do almost everything you need to do just with linux you don't have to get all these additional programs right and that makes it much easier to just figure out one thing and i especially like what you said at the very beginning which i hope a lot of people caught that you don't have to be a techie type person to do this you you you were kind of thrown into having to do this and you you pulled it off without having you don't have to have a computer science degree or be the the it person for the city who knows how to do all these things yeah absolutely you know my undergraduate degree is in philosophy and my first library job was catalog and cookbook so i have technology skills now but most of them have come from projects like this where i have to figure it out right the nice thing about linux is that there's this great community where you know sometimes i'll just tweet out a question and someone will get back to me in 30 seconds with the answer and also it's very difficult well i shouldn't say that it's pretty tricky to really break your computer just with software yeah yeah pretty much you know if you mess up linux you can just delete it and reinstall it you're back on yeah um oh one question to just pop in um that i don't know if you mentioned this do you are your laptops able to send to print in the library there are they like wireless networked into your printer system yes great question so um they are and one of the great things about linux is that it handles drivers really well so it's incredibly easy to set up linux to work with just about any printer which is fabulous and we have um yeah we have wireless printing here so you can just connect to it um we also have a set up so you can email your documents to the printer so oh nice great yeah is that something that was like came with a printer that's some sort of separate program oh we chose that work we went with hp because they built they have that built in the yeah cool all right all right we're a little after 11 i think we'll wrap it up for this morning show um thank you very much everyone for attending thank you so much alex is great i'm glad that you uh people don't know alex had reached out to me originally about doing this on our um big talk from small libraries online conference that we do in the spring but then was unable to join us that day um the scheduling issues um so i said not a problem we've got other options we'll get you out you're out there anyways thank you for having me and thanks for being patient with schedule issue oh not a problem at all we're very flexible here all right so thank you very much alex thank you everyone for attending i'm going to pull back present your control to my screen here now do you there we go get rid of this all right and as i said i've been i'm saving the links into our delicious account here um i'll go back and double check when i get your slides to see if i missed anything um those i'll be here um and our recording will be posted onto our website our encompass live website there we go um what we have here are upcoming shows but right beneath there is a link to our archived encompass live sessions you'll be able to go here let me see last week's show yep our recording goes on youtube the presentation when i get it will be on slideshare and all of our links will be there so you'll have the same kind of thing for today's show um we'll be listed posted here onto our archive sessions probably by the time this afternoon depending on how long the it goes it takes to process everything um so that wraps it up for this week's show i hope you join us for next week when we are doing um the university of press collection a university of bratt and university of nebraska press um the books that they have here that we collect here at the nebraska library commission mary sowers who's our government info services librarian and our new cataloging librarian alison badger will be on the show with us to talk about this the books that we have here history of the nebraska university of nebraska press so if you're interested in that definitely do um join us for next week's show and you can see all of our other upcoming shows are listed here as well we're always adding new ones as we go along so sign up for any of those also we are on facebook if you are a big facebook user please do pop over there and like our page on facebook and you can let me get rid of this better set it up there um i post when our new shows are coming up um here's a reminder for today's show to log in on the fly for people when our recordings are available there we go i post that on here as well so definitely do um if you're big on facebook give us a like over there to keep up with what we're doing on an compass live other than that there i give a brief shout out oh go ahead yes upcoming talk the one on um june 15th with jasmine west is going to be awesome i was in vermont when they started the passport oh really okay really neat great yes yes um i just got that book today right before this show i confirmed it with her um this is something i actually read there was an article about this last fall in the computers and libraries magazine um and then i saw i'm friends with jasmine on facebook um and she's been here actually to Nebraska for other events that we've had in the past um she was involved in our um technology things that we've done here um and i saw that she said they were doing it again and i jumped and sent her an email yesterday and today she said yes of course so yeah um this is a great program they're gonna she's gonna be on with us to talk about this uh visit all your libraries just because they're fun i'm sure there's more to it than that um are you guys thinking about doing that in your state or no not yet i'm just a fan of um the idea yeah yeah um we try as you see we we try to do a mixture of things here on the show the Nebraska things we haven't come from in Vermont uh try to remember what all these other ones are for oh this is from one of our schools a school our esu educational service unit talking about blended learning in school libraries so a little of something for everybody i'm hoping great so thanks a lot alex um maybe you'll join us to watch that one or watch recording if you want to go ahead and register for it so that will wrap up for today thank you very much everyone for attending and we'll see you next time on encompass live bye