Hillsborough County Florida Public Library

Written by Jason Biggers
Principal Librarian
Hillsborough County Florida Public Library





The Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System promotes life-long learning through a network of free libraries with open access, a community focus, welcoming environments and a broad range of relevant materials in a variety of formats.

The library needed an effective search solution for its public website presence as well as its internal intranet. For the web site, we'd tried using a variety of solutions including PSSearch and free software plug-ins, yet nothing proved reliable, much less easy to configure. And for the intranet, we determined we needed to replace the native NT search indexing.

We chose the Google Mini for use with both our web site and intranet because the Google Mini is easy to set up, easy to use, fully configurable and compliant with almost all security issues right out of the box.

The Google Mini's impact has been very positive. So many times you are promised the world by software/hardware sellers and re-sellers. Google has delivered with the Google Mini. So much so that tech support is rarely an issue, and when it is, Google Technical Support is up to the task. The flexibility of software based collection restrictions as opposed to multiple units gives a customer the opportunity to comfortably test implementations without over committing ever decreasing IT hardware budgets. In addition, the Google Mini has been instrumental in helping us reduce help desk calls by more than 50% for issues relating to "where can I find?".

For our web site, we frequently receive comments from the public on how much they enjoy and depend on the new search capability. And for our intranet, the Google Mini provides an interface our librarians are familiar and comfortable using.

Tasked to do more with less but also provide reliable, resilient access? The Google Mini steps up well to the task.

Jason Biggers
Principal Librarian
Hillsborough County Library Services