Library Door Count - 25,235
Print Challenge
As sustainability is focus for our organization we have invested in a software program replacing the, free-no longer supported, version(sustainable) but not the full management package, which allows us to monitor the number of prints and organize them into actionable data.
We will be using the data to find oddball items we can fix utilizing better process rather than any punitive printing limits. We have a good baseline for what staff are doing and the resources they need to provide those services and have no plans for changing those processes.
If you care to participate in our Printing Challenge, below are a few basic tips:
- Double- and triple-check your settings.
- To preview what will actually print, choose Microsoft Print to PDF first.
- Can you fit multiple pages per sheet? Do you need full size?
- Only print the specific pages or sections you need.
- Turn off web page headers and footers to save ink and paper.
Investigating
Credit cards for our public printing and copying. Without citing statistics here the trend is ebbing toward cashless but at the same time the population we serve for printing is a larger sample of people more likely to use cash for daily transactions. Plus we get the question a lot.
To that end, we have done some investigation into a couple of options for taking electronic or credit card transactions. Since we can’t stop taking cash (seemingly) we will need to support both methods and those devices purchase and support are costly. We will continue to look for options hopefully landing in a sweet-spot of lower cost and increased utility for our patrons.
Updates to security doors and fire systems are other item(s) on our investigation list. Maintenance will require an upgrade to our fire management consol to retain the ability to maintenance and upgrade our sensor and suppression infrastructure, and IT needs the same for our security door access system.
We are currently using two separate vendors for those systems, and we found an opportunity where we may be able to unify that to a single vendor and possibly streamline a few processes.
We have quotes and are weighing our options because of course the convenience of streamlining will cost more than keeping them separate, and now we must decide if the cost is worth the benefit.
Why can’t things be simple!?! I’m only kidding, luckily, we get our fair share of square peg, square hole opportunities too!
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
I hadn’t had an AI update in a while, so i asked one of the AI’s - what would AI say about libraries. The answer was larger, but I thought this excerpt was shareable.
Respectfully,
Don and Brendon