Get Connected - April 2008 - (Page 4)

Not Your Average Library High-Tech New Carlisle-Olive Township Public Library, IN, Strives to Be “More Than Four Walls and a Bunch of Books” What do you call a 26,000-square-foot building outfitted with a 52-inch plasma flat-screen television, the Nintendo Wii, PlayStation2 and X-Box 360 game systems, eight additional desktop computers loaded with more games, fourteen laptops with wi-fi access and a café well stocked with candy bars, potato chips, sodas and cappuccinos? No matter what you’d call it, we think we know how a lot of teens would characterize it: a dream come true. Hard as it is to believe, teens in New Carlisle, Indiana, just call it the public library. That’s right, what you might have been sure was the very anathema to every Halo 3-addicted, Red Bull-chugging, shushaverse adolescent that’s ever unleashed a victory yawp after an epic piece of gaming is the hippest place in town. “Out-of-the-box thinking” Library Director Stephen Boggs appreciates the compliment. He’s gotten it a lot, both from his young patrons and from other Indiana librarians that make field trips to his library for ideas to take back home. But he’s not patting himself on the back. According to him, “This is just the basic standard for what every library should consider.” While other libraries have recently been making headlines for loaning video games to their patrons, that service is old hat to New Carlisle-Olive Township. By the time the renting of non-book media such as movie and music was adopted by many libraries across the country in the early and mid-90s, New Carlisle-Olive Township had been doing it for a decade. Explains Boggs, who’s been with the New Carlisle-Olive Township Public Library for 24 years, “Just because we’re in the country doesn’t mean we can’t be progressive. Look, New Carlisle has 2,000 people. Our legal service area includes Olive Township, so that’s another 2,000. Because of the school corporation, we grant service to another 5,000. That’s 9,000 people on a good day. If a library of our small size can do it, someone else can get out there and do it. If I don’t see this at the next place I go, I can’t help but think that they could benefit from some out-of-the-box thinking.” A librarian-planned space In New Carlisle-Olive Township, the mindset is so out of the box that Boggs and his staff played a significant role in the actual design of their library when the decision was made six years ago that a new building was needed. “The architects didn’t always like it, but we hired them, not vice versa,” says Boggs. “It’s certainly paid off. I can’t tell you how many times a visiting librarian has remarked that they can tell librarians planned this space.” Realizing that different patrons seek different experiences from their library stay, Boggs and his colleagues decided on a V-shaped construction, with the end of one arm for adults and the other end of the opposite arm for children and families. They included private study rooms, a 50-person activity room, a large meeting room that can accommodate 127 patrons, a fireplace and the Pirates Cove Café, named in homage to the popularity of The Pirates of the Caribbean films. “Throughout,” says Boggs, “every room was designed to be as adaptable as possible to the things we could envision offering in our library plus the things we couldn’t yet foresee.” To undergird that vision, the library was wired with Cat 6 cabling with the potential for 440 Internet drops. When it became apparent that his single T1 line was inadequate, ENA installed an additional T1, providing more bandwidth, and he’s been very happy with his network’s performance ever since. “We know we’re not going to use all of our bandwidth even at 3 o’clock when all the kids show up after school,” he says. “Right now we generally run at about half capacity, which is about where we should be.” An open invitation to gaming Because of the high-tech setup and the resulting ability to easily evolve their service offerings, New Carlisle-Olive Township knew exactly what to do when they unexpectedly received a donation to the kid’s program a few years ago. Tragically, a teen 4

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Get Connected - April 2008

The End of a Bottleneck: OCPS’ New Network Contents A Letter From the President Not Your Average Library: New Carlisle, IN New Consortium Program Launches May 1 Hands-on Education Education Leaders Decry EETT Cuts Much More Than E-mail: Gaggle’s Other Apps Notes From the CTO

Get Connected - April 2008

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