Can-Do Revolutionary: Leslie Jones

The CD-ROM game collection was becoming an expensive problem for Leslie Jones, collection development manager for the Pasco County Library System (PCLS). There weren't enough games to fill demand from a burgeoning teen population, and the ones they had needed upgrading every time computer operating systems were enhanced.

Her solution: convince Extant Technologies, which offered Games on Demand to individual subscribers, to institute its first-ever library subscription.

Jones spent eight months working with the company to resolve issues like browser requirements, user names and passwords, download time, and bandwidth limitations, which was “uncharted territory for both the library and the vendor,” says PCLS colleague Ruth Urbanski. “Leslie pursued the project with diplomacy, mindful that she was setting guidelines for future ventures from other libraries.”

It was worth the company's effort: as soon as word spread about the success of PCLS's Games on Demand subscription, Extant was flooded with requests from other libraries.

It was worth Jones's effort as well. She calculates that the $10,000 to provide 140-plus online games, available via 80 workstations in multiple branches, is less than the cost to maintain an obsolete CD-ROM collection—and it earned the gratitude of teens, whom Jones calls “our hardest market.”

Jones is known to her colleagues as the “can-do” person you call on when you need to make things happen. She could, and she did—and started a small-scale revolution in the process.