Menu system for public access terminals

[Deidre Lowe]

At the State Library of Victoria we have set up nearly 70 PCs for the 
public which have one menu providing access to the range of resources 
you list below (catalogue, Internet, CD-ROMs, online databases).

We have used a mixture of products to do this, and have had virtually 
no problems since we put the PCs out in public areas at the beginning 
of March.  We are using CARL's Everybody's Menu Builder for the main 
menu interface, Ikiosk for security, and Netterm as the telnet product. 
Information about all of these are available at the URLs
http://carl.org/emb/emb.html
http://www.hypertec.com/
http://starbase.neosoft.com/~2krr01/netterm.html

Using "off-the-shelf" ("off-the-web"?!) products enabled us to set up 
the interface in a very short time - about 3 months from beginning to 
end, at a relatively low cost.  Licence fees for these products are 
listed on the web pages.

We have only had two security breaches since March on the PCs, and no 
software malfunctions at all. 

We have restricted Internet access on most of the PCs to a handful of 
sites, and the full Internet access machines are controlled with a 
booking system.

Melbourne University (also in Victoria, Australia) have developed a 
Visual Basic menu interface, called Buddy.  The contact person is 
David Cunnington: cunnington at lib.unimelb.edu.au

Another friend, Brad Thomas, formerly at the State Library of New 
South Wales (Sydney, Australia) has developed a web-based menuing 
system which uses a number of underlying visual basic programs to 
create web pages on the fly, and to launch the CD-ROMs.  
Brad can be contacted at braddon at qldnet.com.au

I'm happy to answer any specific questions personally, and I am sure 
David and Brad would also be willing to share their experiences in 
developing their own products from scratch. 

> We are planning to create a menu system for our public access terminals   
> that will give patrons access to key Library resources. These resources   
> would include:
>  - our catalogue, accessed via telnet and the web.
>  - our periodical and citation indexes; accessed
>   via DOS or Windows apps. Most of these reside on
>   a Novell server, some are installed on individual
>   workstations.
>  - a few other local apps, may be different on
>   each workstation 
>  - the internet, via Netscape
>  
> The two options we are considering are:
>  - developing a web-based menu system.
>  - developing a custom menu program in Visual Basic.
>  
> I know that many of you have already set up menu systems similar to the   
> one that we are planning. What are the pros and cons of each approach?   
> What kind of system did your library set up, and why? Are there any   
> pitfalls we should prepare ourselves for?
> 
> BTW -- I did read through the archives -- no need to revisit all the   
> Netscape kiosk-mode and filtering issues.
> 
> Thanks for your help,
> Jonathan Esterhazy
>  -------------------------------------
> Jonathan Esterhazy, UML WWW Developer
> jester at bldgdafoe.lan1.umanitoba.ca
************************************************************

Deidre Lowe						Tel: +61.3.9669.9808
Electronic Resources Librarian		Fax: +61.3.9669.9907
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston St, Melbourne,  Victoria   3000

Email:   dlowe at newvenus.slv.vic.gov.au