A Place of Our Own

Installation

Implementation activities for A PLACE OF OUR OWN (the grant commenced in September 1995) proceeded on sequential tracks: electronic and physical. The first thing we did in the fall was to recruit and hire a microcomputer technician to help us design and build the electronic homework center. Using our list of objectives for the center, he began an equipment review. Taking advantage of holiday computer sales, he recommended a small Local Area Network (LAN) of four PC workstations monitored by a powerful server. The system was relatively inexpensive, and at the same time state-of-the-art and highly expandable. He suggested we place quality components in generic PC's. The equipment was ordered, and we turned our attention to making the building ready to receive it.

Upgrading the wiring and repainting the walls, from yellow to a sedate cream with dark green trim, were simple matters. We closed the Branch for the month of December and set the contractors to work. The bright orange steel shelving had to be sent to an auto body shop for repainting so the entire book collection was boxed and removed to library staff garages.

Branch reopening was delayed until January 13. The delay allowed us to remove the many layers of paint on the front double doors and discover beautiful solid oak doors that were easily restored to their original beauty.

Young Friends volunteers were involved in all of these activities. They poured over paint sample charts with us when we were choosing the colors, and joined the debate over what pieces of woodwork to highlight with dark green. They boxed up books when the Branch closed in December, and they even helped knock down shelves for repainting. They were eager to offer suggestions on the new floorplan.

All the shelves returned to the branch, and the books came back from their little journey, too. The computers arrived, and were sent off to the technician's house to be assembled and tested. It took about one month to work out bugs and get the basic parts to work together. Then they were brought to the branch and assembled there on March 3, 1996. The system was running at about 11pm that evening, and was available to the public beginning March 4--the very next day.

At that time, the system offered word processing, reference CD­ROMs, several Math Blasters, and Oregon Trail II. Once the ISDN connection was established with a Pacific Bell Education First grant, internet access was available beginning April 14, 1996.