Session – Windows XP Public Workstation – Personal Computing Interest Group

One of my goals for attending sessions was to seek out some of the smaller interest groups to hear about how public libraries are tackling problems in the hectic day-to-day flow of normal operations.

I thought I would encounter lots of useful advice at this session from practitioners of thwarting the various sneaky tricks of patrons intent on disabling PACs and what native tools to XP there are to assist in this task. And I did – but as far as I could tell, everyone (there were approximately 12) in the room was from an academic library so their perspectives on challenges were focused in that direction.

The participants threw out a lot of useful suggestions, such as a checklist of tasks to prepare a secure XP PAC, discussed software packages for security (DeepFreeze was mentioned most often), and there was also some discussion of the use of individual software packages vs. Active Directory (AD) Group Policies to lock down access.

The discussion highlighted several differences from my experience in working with public libraries around public access computing. One difference in perspectives is the amount of resources I think even small academic libraries have to throw against these problems of managing public access workstations vs. mid-sized or smaller public libraries. These resources are both budgetary, but also person-related – it seems as if even small academic institutions have dedicated technology support staff that assists the library when they have questions.

There was a short discussion of how best to build the relationship with your IT group if you need help. One participant mentioned that chocolate seems to be helpful in obtaining support and another mentioned that the library had been able to get a good deal of support from the IT group, but that was most likely because one of the library staff had married an IT staff person. There was a short pause and then someone piped up, “I hope I never have to go that far to get help from our IT group.”

The leader of the session is setting up a Yahoo group to talk about these specific issues and I will post the information once that becomes live. One other interesting piece from this meeting was that interest groups will become inactive after three years if there is not enough interest. They recently changed the name of this interest group to try to highlight what it focuses on in hopes of generating more interest. So, if you are planning on attending Annual in Chicago, and are responsible for the “care and feeding” of your library’s PACs, check out the schedule and share your experiences and keep this IG alive.