Information brokers at public PCs

[Burt, David]

Jennifer,

Some libraries have policies against "no commercial use" of on-line
resources, but this seems awfully hard to enforce.  When I worked at
NYPL, we had professional searchers line-up at the CD-ROMs, and it was
OK.  The obvious answer to your problem would seem to be time limits on
workstations, at least when others are waiting.  If you don't have a
policy in place about appropriate use of resouces or any time limits, I
don't see how you can ask him to change his behavior.


  ***********************************************************
          David Burt, Information Technology Librarian 
          The Lake Oswego Public Library 
          706 Fourth Street, Lake Oswego, OR 97034
          URL:          http://www.ci.oswego.or.us/library/library.htm
          Phone:     (503) 635-0392 
          Fax:           (503) 635-4171 
          E-mail:      dburt at ci.oswego.or.us 

 ----------
From: Jennifer Reiswig
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: Information brokers at public PCs
Date: Wednesday, May 14, 1997 2:19PM


Does anyone on this list have experience or suggestions for dealing
with information brokers who use your public PCs/terminals as their
office?

We have an individual who essentially runs his business out of our
library. He has been asked repeatedly not to spend hours at the
computers during busy times.  Beyond the inconvenience to our users of
having one of our PCs taken over, I'm concerned about legal problems we
might have when our licensed databases and electronic journals are used
in-house by someone who is sending results to outside clients for a fee.
We are open to the public, and we don't turn members of the public away
from our computers (unless they are disruptive), but this situation
disturbs me.  We've always had document delivery providers photocopy
from our journals, but somehow this feels different.

Does anyone have any kind of guidelines or policy statements they have
worked up for such situations? Have you dealt with a similar situation
before?

PS - I will be on holiday/conference from the 19th through 29th, so
I won't be able to post a summary of replies til then.

Thanks for any help you can offer...

Jenny Reiswig
Reference/Electronic Services Librarian
UC San Diego Biomedical Library
E-mail: jreiswig at ucsd.edu
Tel: (619) 534-1205