USB Drives @ Your Library

bq.I received a phone call from a neighboring library yesterday. The pleasant woman on the phone asked if we allow patrons to use flash drives on our computers. I replied in the positive, and asked why they prohibited this. Guess what she said? She said that there was no policy because she’d never heard of flash drives before. She didn’t think flash drives would be a good idea because they don’t even allow patrons to use floppy discs in their machines. – Aaron I think about this issue every now and then. The twelves computers we use for public stations here are all part of the Gates grant we received in 1999. We have tripled the ram and upgraded them to Windows 2000 and Office 2000. Each one has a DVD drive but they were shipped unplugged and we have left them that way. Originally, in order to deal with the storage issue, they came with Super Drives. But those have log since been replaced with regular drives. For security, we use the Public Access Computer Security Tool . For time management, we use the Public Access Management System. For reliability, we then add Deep Freeze. It may sound like a lot, but what we end up with a highly reliable station that we can depend upon to serve our patrons day in and day out. Over the first third of the year, per station we averaged 192 hours of use by 157 users in the course of a month. So you can see they get used quite a bit. Getting back to the issue of usb drives, we have two issues with that. First, the Gates software prohibits any drive from showing up in my computer. Second, these 20th Century era computers do have two usb ports, but they are located in the back and already in use by the mouse (I don’t think any of them still have ps/2 mice) and the PAMS card reader. So, it isn’t so much that we have a policy against it, it is that we are hesitant to tamper with the efficiency of our curent system to serve the needs of a very few. I have had a handful of people ever ask me about them, and most were disappointed but not terribly so. Prohibiting floppy drives is just plain silly. But supporting USB drives can be a stickier proposition. Making rules just to make rules, though, is not really serving your patrons.