[WEB4LIB] EMail Access at the Public Library

[Daniel Messer]

"Charles B. Gambrell" <cbgamb at acan.net> said:

> 
> Some of our staff are again discussing allowing the public to access email 
> accounts at our library.  At present it is our policy to not support public 
> computer access to email.
> 
> I am curious, in the Public Libraries, who allows and who does not allow
> email.

We allow access to e-mail here at Yakima Valley Regional. The way we have it 
set up is that we have two kinds of public access stations: filtered and 
unfiltered. Now I'm not going to get into the ethics of filtering vs. non-
filtering simply because we had a huge controversy blow up in one of our 
branch libraries about it. 

Basically the way we have it set up is that our users sign Internet User 
Agreements which state our policies and limitations on access. Adults can 
sign up for either filtered or unfiltered access, most choose unfiltered of 
course. Minors can have access to either, but a parent or legal guardian must 
specify on the form and sign for the minor in question. The filtering 
prevents anyone from entering any sort of personal information (supposedly) 
like usernames and passwords. So free access e-mail (i.e. Hotmail) is 
unavailable on those machines. Now the unfiltered is just that, you can acess 
anything including Hotmail or whatever. However, our users are allowed only 
30 minutes of access at a time, unless there's no line of people signed up 
and that is very rare especially at the main library. 

So while our users are allowed to access e-mail, we ask that they do it 
inside of 30 minutes.

Dan



-- 
The subject in question...
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Daniel Messer
Technologies Instructor
Yakima Valley Regional Library
dmesser at yvrls.lib.wa.us
509-452-8541 ext 712
102 N 3rd St  Yakima, WA  98901
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When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
                                         -Hunter S. Thompson