I’ve recently found an interesting site for sharing book recommendations with friends: http://goodreads.com. You can tag books as read or currently reading, rate them, and share your list with friends.
Another similar site is http://librarything.com.
Our on-staff developer, Kyle Hall, has written a kiosk management system for our public Internet computers. We’re piloting it on our fiction department thin clients but plan to use it elsewhere throughout the county libraries as well. Patrons can log in with their library card number (pulled from our Koha database), and the system gives them 30 minutes a day. For more info, visit here:
Google has created a new search site, http://www.searchmash.com, to test new search algorithms and features. One interesting feature is how it breaks down results into images, blogs, videos, and wikipedia results.
We’ve updated our word processing computers located on the Main Floor of the library. They have the latest version of OpenOffice installed, a free suite of applications for word processing and creating spreadsheets and presentations. You can also use USB thumb drives on these computers, the first public computers in the library with this capability.
If you’d like to try OpenOffice at home, you can download it at http://www.openoffice.org. It’s available for Windows, Linux, and OS X.