As a part of the new Library Building project, the Library Information Technology department has been investigating and playing with a number of new technologies. Among them are two things that should be moving out from behind closed doors and into the public spaces in the next couple of months: Digital Signage and Apple iMacs!
Library IT has been working hard the last few months in our secret underground laboratories to test these new products, and we’re getting close to being ready to put them into production. We have eight Apple iMacs that will be hitting the first floor computer area, all of which will have the basic Microsoft Office suite as well as the Apple iLife and iWork suites of software installed. If you’ve been waiting to be able to finally use your operating system of choice at the lirbary, hopefully your wait won’t be much longer.
In addition to having pretty technology that you can touch, we’ll also be launching pretty technology you can look at. The new library building will have a lot of digital signs that give you updates on all sorts of things, but before we get there we needed to practice with them here. We have four signs that we’ll be placing throughout the building, and we’ll be experimenting with the best sorts of information to display on them, how quickly they should change, and more. We’ve a lot of learning to do, and are hopeful that you’ll give us feedback about them once they’re up so that we can make them as useful as possible for students (and faculty and staff) at UTC.
If you have any feedback or thoughts on any of the technology here in Lupton Library, please don’t hesitate to drop me an email at jason-griffey@utc.edu. I’d love to hear ideas, thoughts, problems and more … we can’t make things better unless we hear from you!
image credit: sargassi, licensed through Creative Commons