Welcome to The Tech Desk

Welcome to The Tech Desk – the blog of the Troy Public Library’s Technology Department.

Our Library is in Troy, Michigan, a near north suburb of Detroit, with a population of 85,000. We are a busy place, with over 650,000 visitors a year, circulating over 1.5 million items. Over the past several years, we have regularly placed in the top five libraries of our size in the state.

The Technology Department is a public service department. We have a staff of 17 -- three librarians, eight aides, and six assistants. We staff the Library’s Technology Center, which includes 51 computers, black-and-white and color printers, scanners, CD burners, and computer equipment for visually-impaired users.

In the Center, we work with the public one-on-one, to help people meet their electronic information needs. Whether our computer users are applying for jobs, reading news from around the world, emailing family or friends, or researching for work or school – we pride ourselves on offering excellent service that exceeds their expectations.

In addition to our work with individual computer users, we offer a wide-range of classes: Computer Basics 1 and 2; Navigating the Internet; Word (Beginning and Intermediate), Excel, and Powerpoint; Web 2.0; Blogging; Buying and Selling on Ebay; and Library Resources on the Internet.

Thanks to our knowledgeable staff, our service focus, and our many electronic resources, we are popular. In our fiscal year ending June 30, we had over 98,300 computer users in the Tech Center, and taught 1,000 people in our computer classes.

As you can see, we have a busy operation.

So why this blog?

There are two reasons.

First, as a staff we want to continue the discussion we have with our public around technology issues. Everyday, we find new sites, new fixes, and new tools, to improve our skills. Likewise, each day we learn new ideas from our computer users. We want to share and to build on that knowledge.

Second, we are in the process of remodeling our web site, to bring it up-do-date with many Web 2.0 technologies. We will be experimenting with open source software, feeds, blogs, images, content-management and other tools to make our site more user-friendly for both our public and our general Library staff. We will use this blog to test our new product, and, perhaps, to ask for assistance from many of you.

In the long run, we hope to use this blog to keep up-to-date with technological changes, to share this information, and to better meet the demands of the public at our Library.

Let us know what you think.