[WEB4LIB] Saving large files on public workstations

[TMGB]

I have not heard of having that problem yet in our library but if it did
come up my first thought would be to set up instructions to allow the
student to FTP it to their student account.  Although, that would be
particular to this school if all your students don't have accounts.  Our
default student account is 2 or 2.5 megabytes quota in the campus
computing center.  Another alternative I would consider is to hold the
file for 24 hours on an ftp server with a temporary account for that time
limit and allow the student to ftp it to their home computer.  This may
not be the most efficient approach but it might serve as a solution for
isolated cases or until a better can be found.  Another similar
alternative is have an HTML page with temporary and maybe even passworded
links to those files.  This also would allow the user to load them from
home but would probably be quite time consuming on a regular basis.

We have the Acrobat plugin installed on every public PC which will
automatically open the file.  At that point, I assume students are
printing these large files to our laser printers which do not have any
restrictions set on them like quotas or pay per page.

Thomas

Jean-Marc Edwards wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am wondering how other university libraries are dealing with this
> issue:
>
> Our users would like to download large PDF files but sometimes those
> files are too large to fit on a regular diskette of 1,44 MB. They are
> also very large to send over email. Those PDF files are usually
> full-text articles from electronic journals or databases such as
> ABI/Inform on ProQuest Direct.
>
> How do you deal with this issue ?
>
> Do you provide workstations with Zip drives ? or what other solutions
> have you implemented that would be beneficial for other list members
> to know.
> Jean-Marc Edwards
> Division des systèmes
> Bibliothèques de l'Université d'Ottawa
> Courriel : jedwards at uottawa.ca