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Keeping up with the material and technical demands of your Public Access Computing stations can be difficult, particularly for “accidental techie” librarians and those on a tight budget. In our interviews, we’ve found a number of ways librarians have used to handle this – an interesting variation being contracting for machines, software and support in one bundled package which is meant to ease all of their problems.
Debra Lewis, Head Librarian for Pflugerville, TX, has done just that – and she couldn’t be happier. She recently purchased 32 Discoverstation systems from Userful. Discoverstation is a turnkey “total solution” package for PAC in libraries, generally using a thin client setup and central IT support. A complete, Linux based, application suite is included – which the patrons have easily and comfortably adapted to.
There are many variations on this theme:
If you’re interesting in learning more, WebJunction has a number of articles on thin clients, and courses on Linux. TechSoup has an article on the practical differences between the MS Office Suite and Open Office. In a survey on transitioning to thin clients in an academic environment, Helene Gold of Eckerd College found some interesting results.
Keep checking back with us (or subscribe to the RSS feed!) for more information, updates and case studies.
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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!
