March 11th, 2008 Brian Herzog
A little while ago, grow-a-brain linked to a list of photographs of what some Web 2.0 companies’ offices looked like.
I found this interesting, so I thought I’d share. The photo shown here is in the offices of LinkedIn, a social networking website. When I saw it, I thought it could pass for a children’s room in a library.
Which got me thinking about what library “offices” look like. Public desks are one thing, but a lot of work also happens beyond the public areas, behind those doors marked “staff-only.”
This reminded me there is a Librarians’ Desks flickr pool, which has both public and staff desks. Really, they don’t look all that different from the Web 2.0 companies.
By the way, here are my public and private library desks.
via
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March 1st, 2008 Brian Herzog
This is a question I’ve gotten in various forms, and I finally have an answer for it. Usually, the reference interview goes something like this:
Patron: I can’t open a file on your computer.
Me: Oh; what kind of file is it?
Patron: It’s just my resume. My sister updated it for me on her new computer, but her printer is broken, so I came here to print it out. But now it won’t open. It works fine at her house.
The two key parts of the patron’s last statement are resume and new computer. These words almost always indicate a Word document created on a Microsoft Vista computer running Office 2007. My library’s computers have Windows XP and Office 2003, which cannot open Office 2007 documents due to the change in file formats.
That is, until now.
Our IT person found a plugin that will allow Office 2003 programs to open Office 2007 files. This plugin is available from the Microsoft download center.
We have installed this on the computers at the reference desk, but not yet on all the public computers (we are changing the profiles on all of those, and this plugin will be part of it). And of course, since installing it, I haven’t gotten this question again.
But we’ll be ready for the next patron…
Tags: 2003, 2007, convert, converter, libraries, Library, microsoft, office, plug-in, plugin, public, public libraries, public library, Reference Question, word See Also
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