Welcome!

Welcome to my individual progress log for LIS 5223: Information Technology Management.

I look forward to learning more about the topics that we will cover in this class. In fact, in some ways, I wish that I had had the opportunity to take such a class eight years ago.

I am the Literacy Coordinator at a public library. Several years ago, we had the opportunity to create "Learning Labs" for our adult literacy students. I had some good tools and information on evaluating learning programs, but I had never before had to plan the acquisition of so much hardware and software. Truth be told, I had never even gone through the process of purchasing a home computer for myself! Luckily, we had the support of an excellent IT department (then called Automation and Technology). I learned many lessons through that process, but I would like to know more about the "right" way to implement such a large project.

Currently, I have been thinking quite a bit about creating an online tool for our volunteer tutors to use to interact with each other. This semester, I am also enrolled in Design and Implementation of Web-based Services, and it has given me a lot of options to consider. I have been exploring several sites such as blogger.com, wikispaces.com, cospire.com (at the recommendation of Bhakti, who is on my team in Tulsa), Yahoo! groups, and several others. I have asked for suggestions from some friends who own a data solutions company, and they recommended several free software options that would allow us to host a forum from our library servers.

Though this would be a fairly simple task if I just wanted to create a site for friends or family to enjoy, it is a larger IT management issue when creating it for our volunteers. It would represent our library. It would need to be approved by our library administration, and there are differing views on the amount of control we should have over postings and questions. Do we take advantage of a free online resource, or do we use something that requires space on our servers and some sort of database in the background? These are the kinds of issues I have been pondering lately.