I remember passing through a small town and I stopped at the local library. It was a really small rural library with large unpainted wooden shelves and books purchased during the Carter administration. The librarian sat at her desk right in the front of the room, about ten feet inside the front door. And on her desk was a phone that looked like it was fished out of the dumpster from behind a failed office supply company, a bulky black monster with huge buttons to access multiple phone lines. But in the back of the library, on one of the shelves was a fax machine, with a box next to it that said, "Faxes $2, Deposit money here."
I'm telling you this because we don't fax at our library. We haven't been able to agree on how to run a fax service. Our biggest fears were that we would spend all day showing people how to fax or that 3 or 4 people would run their businesses from the library and walk in at 10:00 and ask, "Where are my faxes, Tricia?" (ok, my name is tricia. darn, I done outed myself).
I keep forgetting that not every library can afford to offer all the services that some can. We seem to have enough money for lots of online databases and computer hardware and new technology. But at my old library, we didn't have that much money. But we were still able to have a computer for patrons to type on. We had a donated copy of WordPerfect on a computer with a laser printer that had been replaced with a newer model and we put a box next to the PC that said, "Prints cost 15 cents a page, deposit you money in the box." And that worked pretty good.
I need to remember that not everyone can do what everyone else can do. But there are still other things you can do if you want to.
Some librarians wouldn't blog even it if was a cure for cancer. But some of them will work on a reference question for three days until they get a good answer. Some librarians will sing a few lines of a song over the phone to someone who can't remember a tune. Some librarians can tell patrons how to fry a turkey.
Small libraries can do things that big libraries are too big to do. And some librarians have time to work on things that "busy-techy" librarians don't have time or interest to pursue.
As long as you believe that your small library is still a useful library, then you'll always find ways to do your job well and serve your customers. Even if it means you have to bend the rules.
I wonder what someone would do if I brought in a fax machine and plugged it in and started sending faxes for patrons.
Sometimes you can say, "I'm just gonna start doing this." And then you do it. And wait until someone bigger than you tells you to stop.
