In the March 2008 Computers in Libraries there is a great article about how the Howard County Library in Md. have switched all public computers to open source software with great results. What I found particularly interesting is the survey conduced using “SmoothWall” to analyze which sites patrons use. Over 80% of web activity in our branches went to five websites in order of number of hits: MySpace, Google, the library catalog, Facebook and Yahoo. As noted in the article its nice to see that the library catalog is in the top five. Also of interest was what patrons are using the computers for–job applications which can sometimes take longer than an hour.

Libraries will not be obsolete in the coming years, but instead will continue to be viable places to locate information, improve lives and communicate with others! Take a look here (hopefully full text soon!!). If the article is not available locally, contact your local SC public library who will contact the SC State Library interlibrary loan services :-))