How do you maintain your public computers?
Librarians want to know.
Librarians want to know.
When asked what has made a big difference in the world of public computers at his library, Eric Brooks of Placer County Library spoke of flash drives. Eliminating another responsibility at the reference desk, the pervasiveness of these powerful gadgets has made public computing a bit easier on the staff and the patrons. No purchasing of disks, and thanks to the recent upgrade, no crawling around on the floor--just pop it in on the USB drive, and you're good!
Eric Brooks, Placer County Library, with Cookbook
In addition to the flash drives, Eric spoke highly of software he uses to make sure no patron can download executables or other harmful programs to a public computer. He uses Faronics Anti-Executable and can't be happier about the results. I used the public computers while I was at the Placer County Library, and was alerted to the potential for illegal behavior when I plugged in my personal flash drive. Nothing stopped me, but I knew my flash drive had been checked out for DLLs and EXEs. Not to worry--I came out clean, and was able to use their fast computers as a visitor, and happily paid for my printing!
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Tell us about your daily routine maintaining public computers, or a moment when you were particularly proud. Don't forget that what might be "that's nothing" to you may be an "aha!" to someone else!
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not downloading executables
A great tool for limiting executables is the Windows Lockdown Kit. You'll probably need to get a technical person to set it up for you the first time, but I imagine it'd be worth it in the log run. (I'm a technical person not a librarian, reading this out of curiosity). What the Windows Lockdown Kit does is, after some configuration, is prevent people from making changes to the computer. It ends up working more like a kiosk. You can set which programs people are allowed to use (a web browser, word processor, library specific tools) and which they aren't. People using the computer can save their results to a flash drive or other devices you specify. But, the great part from a support perspective is every time the person logs out then any changes they made to the system are lost as the system resets itself to the configuration that was initially specified.
Windows Lockdown Kit
Hi there! Thanks for the tip. This is really practical information that I'm sure libraries can use. We've heard from libraries that have implemented similar solutions, like Deep Freeze or Windows SteadyState for group polices. No matter what they use, all libraries and all patrons face real problems when the computers aren't protected from intentional or unintentional tampering. Any ideas you or others can share are truly helpful. Thanks for posting your thoughts!