Colorado Team: Library Outreach

[Corey Burger]

On 2/5/07, David Overcash <funnylookinhat at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings from the Colorado community team!
>
> One of our team members recently suggested that we pursue local
> libraries as points of conversion, and the goal was confirmed by our
> team members in our most recent meeting.  We realized that we would
> rather not re-invent the wheel and thought to ask you all first if any
> of you have pursued this avenue of contact.  We are looking to convert
> both kiosk computers and entire computer labs to Ubuntu, and providing
> the necessary local support to get them on the right track.  Would
> additional support be a good place to reference Canonical, or should
> that stay in our court?

Putting on my Userful hat:

Just FYI, I used to be Sales for Userful (now I do marketing), selling
a Fedora-based product called DiscoverStation to libraries. I have a
customer in Colorado, Garfield County Public Library.

Selling to libraries is hard. Very hard. They have a nice combination
of no money and no tech staff. Not the ideal situation for trying to
get them to run Linux. The only libraries that run Linux are either
Userful or have a tech in house that builds them their own distro.
Beauregard Parish Library in LA does this, as they build White Box
Enterprise Linux, and Howard County in Maryland just switched from
their own distro, LiMux, to Groovix, an Ubuntu deriv.

Here is what I would recommend, and this is not because I want to sell
more :). is to try and get Ubuntu into the libraries catalogue and
then work slowly on getting one of the smaller libraries to adopt it.
After all, Linux is very much a "rising tide lifts all boats"
situation. Most Average Joes don't know the difference between this
Linux and that Linux.

You also need something that is a one-disk, no configuration install.
Edubuntu it almost there yet, but needs a few more public computing
bits. I believe Scott Balneaves in Manitoba is working on this.

Cheers,

Corey