How do you maintain your public computers?
Librarians want to know.
Librarians want to know.
Last week I interviewed
Lisa Prolman, assistant director at the Greenfield Public Library in western Massachusetts.
Lisa provided an amazing amount of information on a huge range of
subjects. A tech-savvy librarian who is
mostly self-taught, Lisa shared, “I have the unfortunate combination of being
curious and fearless. My general feeling
is click first, see what happens later.”
Her attitude has lead to
great success with her network and an excellent relationship with her
technology consultant. While we were
talking, Lisa gave me the first explanation of what group policies are that I
have ever understood, so I thought I would share her thoughts. Group Policy is a feature of Windows
operating systems that provides centralized management of machines and users in
an Active Directory environment. She
explained Group Policy as the library’s second line of defense, after Deep
Freeze. “In Deep Freeze you go through
and you can tell what drives you want the computer to have access to, which is
great. Group Policy also does that. You can block access to the C: drive”. So, in practice, Group policies mean that
your general user off the street will only be allowed access to programs and drives
that you, the librarian, want them to be able to access. Lisa further explained, “So our Group Policy
keeps people from getting to the hard drive of the computer or getting to our
network drives or downloading executable files.”
If you want to learn more about Group Policy, here are some sites you may find useful:
Jennifer Nelson
Summer Interviewing Intern
Rutgers School of Communication, Information and Library Science
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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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