Karen Schneider wore deer boots and turtlenecks circa 1975, and claims she can still be spotted wearing them to this day.  She learned what “going commando” means only recently.  She is also known as the free range librarian, a co-moderator of the PUBLIB public librarian discussion list, an Air Force vet, the newly appointed library director at Holy Names University, a published food writer and a beer home-brewer.

Schneider was also the keynote speaker for Friday morning’s session of the Iowa Library Association ’09 Annual Conference, where she gave her talk, “Waxing and Waning: Tech Trends for the Library Landscape.”  You can check out the slides from her talk here (via slideshare):

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(some good advice from Jessamyn West: “put bunny ears on your headphones so no one will steal them”)

It was so much fun to hear Jessamyn West, one of my all-time favorite library bloggers, give her talk on On-the-fly Tech Support at the 2009 Iowa Library Association Annual Conference in Des Moines.  Being the awesome techie librarian that she is, she has already made all of her notes and slides available on the internet, so all I have to do is tell you about how fun she was.

So way  back in 1997, Salon.com wrote up a neat feature called “Are We Ready for the Library of the Future?“, explaining that librarians have become “the general public’s last-resort providers of tech support.”  Yet twelve years later, lots of librarians still don’t have a clue how to troubleshoot.  Never fear librarians, Jessamyn West to the rescue!  Here are some key pointers for the on-the-fly tech support librarian:

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