Librarian Geek at the West Warwick Public Library

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Purchase USB drives at the library

In an earlier post I talked about the sad, slow, lingering death of floppy disks and drives. New computers aren't even offering floppy drives anymore unless you're willing to pay extra for them, and we see the disks fail on an almost daily basis here at the library. So, in an effort to speed them on their way to obsolete technology land, the library will be selling 16mb USB drives for $10.00 each, and 64mb USB drives for $15.00. These little drives hold the equivalent of approximately 11 and 44 floppy disks respectively and are much less fragile and much more stable. So, if you've been using a pile of floppy disks to save your old tax returns (which you do have a hard copy of, too, don't you?), or for that novel you're working on, or to preserve your mom's secret fruitcake recipe, now is the time to convert those files to a USB device (and make a hard copy, too, while you're at it because paper never gives you a formatting error!) And you can do all this at the library!

And if you're still wondering what to do with all those old floppy disks now that you've got your USB flash drive and live comfortably on the cutting edge of technology, well you could do this.

If you'd like to leave a comment or question about this entry, click on the comments link below to do so! We'd love to get your feedback!

posted by Laura at 9:18 AM

6 Comments:

  • What a great idea! We had such horrible problems last semester with students losing work, floppies suddenly not working, etc. We currently loaning out flash drives and I've seen more patrons with their own this semester. I only took it as far as creating a user guide for staff and students. So, how easy was it to get your library to put a link to your blog on their website? I need to do this...

    Beatrice Pulliam
    Phillips Memorial Library
    Providence College

    By Blogger Beatrice, at February 20, 2005 10:58 AM  

  • It's just a simple link from our home page to the blog at Blogger.com. Since I also help update our site, adding this link wasn't a big problem.

    And as for the USB drives--PC Connection had the best prices on small sized drives that were more affordable for our patrons.

    By Blogger Laura, at February 22, 2005 7:08 AM  

  • Sorry, I meant how much, if any convincing did you have to do. But if you update the website, probably not much. :-) Thanks.

    Beatrice Pulliam

    By Blogger Beatrice, at February 22, 2005 10:21 AM  

  • No convincing necessary, really. The library director thought it was a good idea so the blog began. :)

    By Blogger Laura, at February 22, 2005 10:34 AM  

  • The U.S. government appears to be publishing less and less on paper and more and more on the web.

    You give great advice about making a paper copy of tax returns and fruitcake recipes. I just wish the U.S. government would take your advice - 100 years from now I doubt we'll still be able to access those web-only .pdf documents our government seems to love.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at March 13, 2005 11:53 AM  

  • I've always been a big fan of paper--it never gives you 404 error and you don't have to wait for it to boot so you can use it. The Internet can be an amazing place, but it's a shame to think of what we've lost access to because there's no reliable archive and we can't control it.

    By Blogger Laura, at March 13, 2005 3:53 PM  

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