e-mail and new services for public use in libraries ?

[Miriam Bobkoff]

We give our patrons telnet access, so that they can telnet into their
accounts if they have a shell account or their provider accepts telnet.
(This doesn't work for AOL, Juno, or earthlink customers, apparently.
Perhaps others.)

Patrons who don't have an account anywhere (or a PC at home to access a
hypothetical account) we encourage to try HotMail or one of the other
webbased free services. Actually, since the stations are close enough to
each other for the patrons to give one another help, experienced HotMail
users often suggest HotMail to the newbies & help them get themselves set up
without any intervention from us.

It's not perfect. But having myself been desperate in strange towns for
someplace to telnet from, I hope we don't define a bit of casual email
access as out of our purview, at least not until there is coin-op access on
every street corner.

Miriam Bobkoff             mbobkoff at ci.santa-fe.nm.us
Santa Fe Public Library
145 Washington Avenue      
Santa Fe, NM 87501         
(505)984-6832              http://www.ci.santa-fe.nm.us/sfpl/


At 11:54 AM 3/25/97 -0800, you wrote:
>Hello:
>
>I get questions from patrons all the time concerning email, and why they
>can't send any on our public access internet computers.  Usually they want

>>On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Andre Backs wrote:
>>
>>Hello.
>
>>We allow the public use their own e-mail (telnet, pop, imap) from our
>>terminals freely.  Sending mail is also possible even without own address,
>>simply using browser's capabilities or preferrably the special WWW-form 
>><URL:http://kirjakaapeli.lib.hel.fi/cgi-bin/wwwmail>.