Writeable CD drive on a public machine?

[Donald Barclay]

My two cents worth as a "Voice of (Limited) Experience." I'm looking out my
door at a lab with 20 brand-new public-access workstations, each of which
has a floppy, Zip (250), and CD-W drive. The machines have been up and
running for a week and, so far, no problems. Or complaints.

We had Zip (100) drives on our old machines, and never had many Zip
questions. My theory is that people who use Zip drives are pretty savvy
computer users, and I think (hope) the same thing will prove true of the
CD-W crowd. It seems unlikely that you will run into many "I've never used a
computer before but I want to make a CD" situations. We sell floppy and Zip
disks, and we will sell CD-W disks if there seems to be a demand.

What has made life easier for us with the new workstations is that they have
Centurion Guard but are otherwise wide-open for users to manipulate just as
they would their own machines. Users can access Windows Explorer, save or
copy files to any directory, save to disk, burn CDs, and otherwise do what
they will. When a machine gets trashed (which has already happened a few
times) we reboot and everything goes back the way it was. I don't mean to
sound like a commercial for Centurion Guard, but so far I'm a big fan.

As for the copyright issues, I can see treating a CD-W just like any other
copying device. Beyond that, I seem to have misplaced my Honorary Copyright
Police badge. (It was given to me by Richard Nixon in a White House
ceremony. You've probably seen the photograph.)

Donald A. Barclay
Houston Academy of Medicine-
Texas Medical Center Library                  always the beautiful answer
dbarclay at library.tmc.edu                      who asks a more beautiful
question
713-799-7120                                            --e.e. cummings