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Doing more with less...

Last month I spoke at the Ark Conference Managing your law firm library and information service through challenging times as I've said in my previous post this was a really interesting conference, which looked at some of the challenges facing law libraries.

My talk entitled "Delivering information to your fee-earners on the cheap" was about how Law Libraries could use Open Source and other cheaper technology solutions to provide services to their users. There have been several examples recently of Libraries moving from vendor provided solutions to open source applications. The King's Fund moving their Library Management System from the SIRSI Dynix application to an open source application called Koha is one of the most recent examples.

During the course of my research into this presentation I found some very interesting resources, which because I'm the nice blogger I am I thought I'd share with you my readers.

• 13 Ways (and 147 Tools) to Help Your Library Save Money on Technology is a great blog post from the Librarian in Black which looks at a number of cheaper technology solutions. This is a great post which if you haven't read all ready you definitely should.
• 10 Technology ideas your Library can implement next week is an article written by the iLibrarian which looks at technology ideas that can be easily implemented by libraries.
• More with less is a post from the Sue Hill blog which was published after my presentation, but which confirms the expectation that libraries are expected to do "more with less"

There are also a few presentations I consulted, which are well worth reviewing:

• Open Source software and Libraries
• Open Source Library Software
• Open Source Library Management Systems

Sadly my feeling is that Law Libraries and Librarians will continue to have to do more with less for the forseeable future. The good news is that there are plenty of tools available that can help librarians manage and develop their services.

Picture from Flickr

Full post as published by LI Issues on March 11, 2010 (boomark / email).