[OPLINTECH] Flat Screen TV/Monitor Systems for Publicity

[Nathan Eady]

"Susan Allen" <sallen at worthingtonlibraries.org> writes:

> If anyone out there on this list is using large flat screen TVs or
> monitors to display information about programs at your library, I
> would love to talk to you.  Our community relations department would
> like to set one up to use at a couple of our libraries and we are
> looking at options. 

How *many* monitors are you talking about?

My gut instinct, if I wanted to set up something like that here, would
be to set up a five-year-old computer to run a screensaver that just
shows images in a slideshow fashion out of a fixed directory, then add
a feature to our "news item management" utility (we input news events
one place, and they end up on several web pages, including a public
calendar) so that it would use Image::Magick or somesuch to generate
images containing the info about each event, and transfer them to the
"screensaver" PC, possibly via CIFS, and remove them when the event is
past.  You could also put custom images in there as desired.

The big cost would be the long video cables (or adaptors to run the
video over ethernet, or what-have-you), assuming you don't want to put
the PC physically next to the display.

I'm not sure how many monitors you want to drive from a PC, though, so
depending on the size of your operation and scalability considerations
this approach might not work as well for your site.

And also, if you don't already manage your news items with a custom
program that you can easily modify to add such a feature, then having
to create images for each news item might not be ideal for you.
  
-- 
Nathan Eady
Galion Public Library