Assignmt 1

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	Greetings from the fastest growing county in PA, Pike Cty.  Although
we are 90 miles from Manhattan, we are a typical Northern Tier county in
many ways.
1.  Most pressing needs...
	*Advocacy on behalf of libraries, especially with telecomm providers.
A patron who works for a phone company gave his opinion that we should not
"hold our breath"; in other words his feeling that his company would drag
their
corporate feet at best and at worst find a way to defeat the provisions of
Universal Service in our area.
	*Affordable technical expertise.  Our small 5-user LAN was set up by a
one-time consultant.  I read the text of this discussion, in fact, at a
rest stop on
the return leg of a 90-mile round trip to take our LAN server to the
company that
takes care of our network.  No techie on staff, needless to say. 
Volunteers are
wonderful, but we find little continuity in technical advice from them.
	*Information on technology appropriate for public libraries.  Neighboring
libraries can only give us info on what they already have; salespeople are
delighted 
to help us write an RFP, but should we trust them?  

2.  Schools and public libraries
	*Link-to-Learn was intended to encourage the creation of consortia to
share technology, but I fear public libraries may be the forgotten partner
unless
we develop more local clout.  The application process in 1996 seemed to
favor
institutions that already had some access to infrastructure, such as IUs
and Districts, 
as opposed to those such as local government and public libraries seeking
grants
to start from scratch.
	*School Districts may be in a better position than public libraries to 
negotiate their own discounts on a local level, being much more visible
consumers.
	*Both public schools and public libraries face the problem of sustaining
the effort, as many posters note--the 3 to 4 year time horizon of hardware
and software
seems to come as a shock to taxpayers in both cases.

3.  Differences between urban and rural libraries
	*There is a growing demand among patrons of our libraries for a glimpse of
the new technologies they hear and read about.  Much of our county still
can't get
the Internet at home, certainly not with a local call; a major problem is
lack of cooperation
among phone companies.  At the same time, there is actually a lack of
competition among
phone companies.  We get the feeling we should be thanking them for serving
us at all,
since we provide little revenue compared to the cost of maintaining phone
lines over
every mountain and down every hollow.  A patron joked that we should ask
Dr. Gary 
Alt, the Game Commission biologist who has put radio collars on so many
Pike County 
bears, to give them each a cell phone too--then maybe we'd have a big
enough 
customer base to get some attention!
	*The Bell Atlantic/Commonwealth Libraries "Online @ PA LIbraries" project
is a very bright spot for rural libraries, bringing great excitement and
raising the visibility
of the library.  Another bright spot: although phone companies don't line
up to compete for
our business in this area, we now have 4 ISPs.  All are recent startups,
and two at least see
the public library as a way to introduce themselves to the public.  They
are giving
free internet access to two of our branches.  Problem:  now patrons
increasingly see as 
their right a service that didn't exist a year ago, and there is some
disatisfaction over the
number of public access Internet terminals in the county (2), and the level
of technical
help they can expect from our staff and volunteers.  Perils of success!
	*I believe our District, the Scranton DLC, should serve as a model.  The
District
has established a computer lab to train local library staff members and
volunteers, including
part-timers.  I see this as becoming more and more valuable as we write our
Technology
Plan, write grants to put our holdings into Access PA and onto the Internet
and wire our
branches--if we can make all those things happen.
-------------------------------------
Patricia Lawson
Pike County Public Library
717-296-8211
pikpubli@pikeonline.net
http//members.tripod.com/~pikepubliclibrary

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