Providing off-site, concurrent users with access to CD-ROM legal sources

[Dwight McInvaill]

The Georgetown County Public Library is in charge of the local law
library which is housed in a small room in a building next to the
courthouse. Since space is very limited, we are working to automate our
law library.  We are now getting the majority of our sources on CDs - a
very recent change - and we plan to provide an Internet workstation for
the lawyers in the near future.

We would like to provide from 2 to 5 concurrent users with off-site
access to our CD-ROM legal sources.  We have a 75-unit tower and a 233
MHz pentium.  But I need to know how best to make the connection
possible from our law library to the concurrent users off site - both
from technical and a BUDGETARY points of view.  Do I just need to get a
high-speed modem of some kind?  If so, what type and at what cost?  And
then what about the outside hookup?  Will just a telephone line suffice?

Being in a small, Southern, rural town - far from Silicon Valley - we
are all still learning here by the seat of our pants; so, if the answers
to these questions seem obvious to you, please realize that our level of
technical knowledge is quite limited - although growing!

We will appreciate very much any help on this issue.  

Also, I would like to thank all of you who responded to our request for
information on teaching county personnel about the Internet and also to
our query about constructing a public library WEB site.  We are at work
on this project, too, and have found your suggestion to be quite
valuable.

We are also now sponsoring classes on how to use email.  The response
has been overwhelming at all three of our branches.

Sincerely,

Dwight McInvaill
Director, Georgetown County Library System
gcldirector at infoave.net

405 Cleland St.
Georgetown, SC 29440

Georgetown is midway between Charleston & Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
It is one of the prettiest and most historic coastal towns in America,
with structures dating mainly from the 1820s. It is situated on Winyah
Bay and is surrounded by marshlands and the vestiges of an antebellum
plantation rice culture.  It's just down the road from Pawleys Island
and beautiful Brookgreen Gardens and just up the road from the fishing
village of McClellanville. It is entering the Information Age, albeit
gradually ...