[WEB4LIB] CD-Writable question

[John Harvey]

Tom Edelblute wrote:

	Management sees the public doing quite a bit of downloading to
floppy
	disk (our hard-drives are blocked by System Policy Editor) and they
see
	the public doing more downloads in the future with video and audio
	files.  Should the library be investing in CD-RW drives so the
public
	can save files to CD instead of floppy?

My experience with CD-RW disks (on my own PC) is that it can take up to
twenty or thirty minutes to format blank disks. I suppose that you could
stipulate that users must bring pre-formatted disks with them, but it seems
to me that a better solution might be to replace your PCs' floppy drives
with either Zip drives or the so-called "superfloppy" drives, which can read
and write ordinary 3.5" disks as well as the new 120 Mb disks.

I think that the problem in any case might be that someone's going to be
left out: Zip and superfloppy drives, while widely used, are still far from
being standard even on new PCs, and users who wish to download onto CD-RWs
may not have the drives on their home or business PCs to preformat them.

====================

John C. Harvey
Irving Public Library
jharvey at irvinglibrary.org