Email and humoungous hard drive

[Leone Cole]

Apologies for combining two very different subjects.

1)	Hard drive

A year and a half ago when we replaced all of our dumb terminals with PC's 
I had the brilliant idea of the humungous hard drive.  We would load all of 
our CD's on it and everyone would be happy.  It didn't work out that way. 
 Most of the CD-ROM's could not be loaded on a hard drive, and the ones we 
could load slowed everything to a crawl.  We went the CD tower route and 
are in the process of loading Discport to the management.  Some of our 
genealogy CD-ROM's could not be loaded in the tower -- they insisted on 
being used on a PC only.  What a pain!  After a year and a half, we are 
seeing use of CD-ROM's dropping and use of online subscriptions increasing. 
 It's much easier.

2)	Patrons doing email

Yes, our machines are tied up constantly with people doing email.  For some 
people, especially immigrants, our email is invaluable.  We would never 
restrict access to this very important resource.  Think about it -- patrons 
are finding out that resources we provide are vitally important in their 
lives!  Isn't that what we are supposed to be about?

We also don't look over their shoulders.  I know if (or should I say when) 
budget cuts happen, I will have a solid base of people to go to bat for 
library resources.

Leone Cole
Director
Watertown Free Public Library
Watertown, Masachusetts