Our village library's journey in PAC, from desktops to thin-client and now to nettop computers.
In 2007 I operated a Windows hosting business in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One day I got a call from one of our vendors who sold “thin clients”. Thin clients are simple computers designed to lower maintenance costs, exposure to viruses, and lower power usage. Waterford Public Library had bought about a dozen thin-client computers from them to use as public access terminals and were having problems with the implementation. These machines were replacing an older network of traditional PC's.
It's widely known that public access computing is an entirely different game than standard home or business computing. Frankly, it must be assumed that your users are going to cause problems on the machine; either by virus infection, changing a software option, outright vandalism, or most likely - from lack of knowledge. A public access machine must be locked down in a number of ways to protect the library from maintenance costs and downtime, but still be usable to the patron without encumbrances.
Slowly but surely we were able to make the thin clients work for public access. We installed Internet Explorer as well as Firefox to give users a choice in web browsers. Since the thin clients had limited on board storage, we installed Microsoft Office on a Windows Terminal Server and deployed it to the workstations remotely. Users log in with a simple USB stick that is assigned to their workstation – this prevents unauthorized access and makes sure users properly log off when finished in order to delete their surfing history and cookies. Printing is handled at the Information Desk, with users paying for their print jobs at pickup.
For the past two years these thin clients have served our patrons well, but we have learned quite a few things. Thin clients, while good at stopping threats like viruses and vandalism, are really not that easy to maintain. Software updates have to come from the manufacturer – not from Microsoft – due to the proprietary nature of a thin client. Our thin clients used a Compact Flash based hard disk; these perform much slower than regular drives and deteriorate with age making them even slower. We found as time went on, we were having more and more problems keeping the machines running and up to date, and users were also reporting poor performance.
The emergence of “net-top” computers (sub $350 laptops and desktops) over the past year has changed our course. These computers have many of the benefits of a thin client such as a small footprint and lower power usage, but are standard PCs with a regular hard disk and a faster CPU. They can be locked down just as a thin client with Windows SteadyState, a free Microsoft utility developed for libraries. We designed an easy to use Windows Desktop with large icons and descriptions to assist users. We also ported our USB login system over to this platform, and developed a remote maintenance system to administer it.
Like anything in technology, public access computing is always a challenge and a learning process. From desktop PC's, to thin-clients, now returning to net-top PC's we have come full circle and so far, users are reporting good things about the net-tops and prefer it to our older thin client workstations. With cost-effective hardware like net-tops, and well established administration software like Windows SteadyState, you can put together a powerful public access workstation for your users, with little hassle for your staff.
Nate Erb
owlsurf.com / Waterford Public Library volunteer
