My Old LibTech Blog (2013-2016)

... was the #1 IT-related desideratum emerging from our recent library customer-satisfaction survey, known in the Library trade as LibQUAL.This is of course great from my perspective; when your biggest problem is that people want you to do more of what you're already doing, you're on the right track at least.



As with many IT issues, it isn't really an IT issue at all, it's more economics. The technical problems associated with scaling up public computer labs have pretty much been solved; and while there is still an art to rolling out a well-designed computing facility, simply adding more units has only a smallish impact on staff time (the single biggest cost associated with running any service point).

However buying the computers and refreshing them every four to five years, does have a significant ongoing cost. Right now, the amortization is approximately $200/computer/year, so given that we have around 250 public computers scattered about, that translates to $50,000/year just to maintain our existing facility.

There are other costs as well. The figure above doesn't include our lending laptops or our Macs (both with a higher unit cost; particularly the Macs with their fancy Adobe software) or peripherals like scanners and printers, the power needed to run all of these things, or the cost of networking them. And of course there are costs in space and furniture, including the opportunity cost (the more computer carrells, the fewer study tables or bookshelves).

And while it's easy to ask for "more better computers", in reality more and better are somewhat in competition with each other. Assuming you have a finite budget (and we do), you need to make a tradeoff between fewer better computers, and more not quite as good computers. In the realm of tech "better" typically means "newer". If you have, say, $50,000/year to spend on computers costing $1000 a pop, you can afford to maintain 50 computers on a one-year replacement cycle (where you replace all of them every year), or 250 computers on a five-year replacement cycle. Opting for the former means you won't have nearly enough computers to go around, inevitably leading to demands for more computers. Opting for the latter means at any given time 20% of your computers will be 5 years old, leading to requests for better computers.

All of which isn't to say that we won't be getting more computers; just that whether we do will have to be weighed against all of the other demands for the Library's resources. This is one of the challenges of providing services that don't of themselves generate revenue: it's not always obvious how to scale up when what you're doing becomes popular. In the meantime we are in the process of upgrading the oldest 20% of our computers to this years' model, and students returning next week should be pleased to see we've upgraded all our productivity workstations to dual 19" monitors.

To me the most surprising aspect of the demand for more computers is how it never seems to go away. It was the same back when I started here in 2006, and probably every year since then, even though our fleet of workstations has grown significantly over that time. With the advent of ever cheaper consumer laptop-like devices ($250 for a Chromebook, now) and the proliferation of mobile computing devices, why do so many people still want to use our staid, corporate-style Windows 7 desktops? I keep expecting the demand to taper off, but so far neither client feedback nor usage stats bear that out. Maybe next year.