The MaintainIT Project, a project of our mother organization, TechSoup, is a three-year project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that is working with public libraries to identify best practices of technical support for public computers.

The Project works with libraries throughout the U.S. and Canada, while focusing on libraries in the 18 states that are receiving the first round of hardware upgrade grants from the Foundation.

Thanks for all the comments,  sounds like there will be some other participants who are also either working in libraries or aware of the issues going on in the profession!  I should add a disclaimer of sorts,  while I mentioned the university that I work for, I won't be participating in the conference as their representative. I'm here on my own time/dime because I'm interested in the issues and technologies, especially because libraries continue to find themselves pulled further into the larger digital environment that keeps evolving and changing. So my thoughts and comments are representative of myself and and not my employer.

Stuart Weibel is a Consulting Research Scientist at the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). OCLC is a worldwide library co-operative and the providers of the WorldCat (world catalog) service. In addition to working at OCLC for 20 years, Stuart spent 10 years leading the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.  Stuart is on sabbatical for calendar year 2006 at the iSchool at the University of Washington.

Stuart is especially interested in social software models, the Web 2.0 movement and its implications for so-called Library 2.0 thinking.

Gary Price is the editor of ResourceShelf.com, the News Editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, a contributer to Docuticker.com and a librarian. 

Price graciously spent a long time with me on Instant Messaging doing the interview that follows.  You can click on any of the summary points below to skip to that part of the interview, then click your browser’s “back” button to return to the top, or you can read the whole story straight through.  All off-site links will open in a new window, so you can check them out without leaving the interview.