Selecting CD ROMS for Public Access PCs

[Robert Sullivan]

Donna Schumann wrote:

>Because I've been burned before, I had bought evaluation copies to test.
>However, I'm sure that other libraries are going through the same kind of
>trial and error picking which CD ROMs to buy and then figuring out how to
>secure them for public access PCs. 

I haven't networked them, but I have run a few from a hard drive.  Here are a
few pointers:

1) Ebsco supports this, and tells you how to do it on their site.

2) UMI doesn't support it, but when I called them they had no legal objection
to us trying it.

3) Many CD-ROMs are written to run under older versions of Windows, which means
that even if you're using NT, you will need to provide access to the following
executable files in c:\winnt\system32: dosx, gdi, krnl386, mscdexnt, redir and
user.

4) Some vendors appear to define supporting NT as "will run for you as an
administrative user" but if you need security, prepare to suffer.

>It turns out that I needed to buy the network version of Grolier's in order
>to run it from the hard drive (as opposed to running it from CD ROM
>drives). And in WinNT, Virtual Globe only runs if you have Administrative
>access.  

It may just be a matter of adjusting the permissions.  I know that Ebsco's
(before I unlocked those 6 files mentioned above) would not start at all, and
there was no error message.  I had to turn on auditing and comb through the
Event Viewer to figure out what the problem was.

5) Some vendors have exaggerated ideas about how much access their products
need - sometimes their response is "just give read/write access to the system
directory" (I think not).  It may only need to write new files there, so you
could protect what's there and allow it to write new ones.  If it only needs to
write to a specific file, you seal off everything but that.

Bottom line - some of this is pretty out on the edge for a lot of CD
publishers.  They may not even have an NT computer inhouse to test, or they may
have done it under admin access.  I'm about to work with a number of
educational CDs, and I suspect NT is not a large part of their market.

P.S. Don't try this with Adams Job Bank (now Fast Resume) unless you're a real
masochist.  The programmer was very helpful, but after working on it for weeks
it only sort of functions.  I'm glad it wasn't the first CD I tried, or I would
have sworn off completely.

Bob Sullivan                               scp_sulli at sals.edu
Schenectady County Public Library (NY)     http://www.scpl.org