Director of technology for the Shenendehowa Public Library in Clifton Park, New York.
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for February 2000
“Ah, so they’ve got the Internet on computers now.”
—Homer Simpson
Public computers in libraries have attracted a storm of angry controversy in some quarters; but day in and day out, many patrons are endearingly unsophisticated, and their interactions with computers are the stuff of lore.
To begin with, many patrons want to do the right thing, and they diligently try to follow our instructions. So imagine “the anguished looks on [patrons’] faces when they report that the computer said they performed an illegal operation,” as Susan Colowick of North Olympic Library System in Port Angeles, Washington, reported. In many cases, people are applying rules that make sense in other parts of human life (where illegal means breaking the law, not a computer crash). There’s a certain logic to “the patrons who slip their library cards into the a: drive because the screen told them to ‘input their library card number’ and they thought it was like an ATM,” as Lorraine Smith, systems supervisor at the Oakville (Ont.) Public Library, told me.
Past the initial hurdles, patrons may begin venting frustration when the rules they use in other parts of life don’t apply. Patricia Uttaro of the Ogden Farmers’ Library in Spencerport, New York, shared this story. “A very irate older man couldn’t get his computer to work and couldn’t figure out what he was doing wrong. I went back to the workstation with him and asked him to show me what he had been doing. He said, ‘I’m just trying to start the darn program,’ and proceeded to pick up the mouse and point it at the monitor like a TV remote.”
E-mail seems to be a difficult concept for true computer novices to wrap their brains around. First there are the patrons who don’t understand why you need to establish e-mail accounts to begin with. Dusty Gres, director of the Ohoopee Regional Library System in Vidalia, Georgia, told me about the patron who “thought that ‘everyone’ had an e-mail address and when you typed your name in a search engine you could find all the messages everyone had been sending you.”
Once patrons get their sea legs on e-mail, they may begin questioning the system. Debra Lords of the University of Utah Marriott Library sent me the following: “A student came in angry, demanding satisfaction. She insisted she was being discriminated against with her e-mail account. Explaining the problem to the befuddled help desk assistant, she said she had an unreasonably long @ name to type in. The assistant attempted to explain that [machineName].[domain].utah.edu is the standard pattern for all university addresses. ‘Well then,’ she demanded to know, ‘why did you give my friends short ones like @aol.com?’”
Then there are patrons who try to be bad—by doing things such as stealing mouse balls. I always wonder, why mouse balls? (In many places it would be easier to steal the entire mouse.) I was offered two theories: first, from Robin Hastings, computer services assistant at the Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City, Missouri, who reported that “there was a fad going around for a while where kids (7th and 8th grade, mostly) were stealing mouse balls to make them into ‘jewelry’ of sorts.” Craig Summerhill of the Coalition for Networked Information in Washington, D.C., offered what I think of as “the condom defense”: “They are too embarrassed to walk into a store and ask someone if they have mouse balls.” Craig also mused, “The PS/2 [mice] do have a nice ‘superball’ kind of sshwing to them.” Craig—is there something you wanted to confess?
A variation on this theme is the older librarian bravely attempting to learn computing for the first time. Bette Ammon, director of the Missoula (Mont.) Public Library, told me, “A library staffer (now retired) came to my office in a panic saying her computer was infested with bugs—they were crawling all over her screen. Of course I’m thinking virus—but what was really happening was that our computer consultant had opened a screen saver that displayed insects crawling about.”
If there is a prayer for computer librarians, it begins, “Creator, save me from the patron who wants to be helpful.” Who knows how many toner cartridges have been trashed in the name of someone being “helpful?” Skip Booth, information systems manager at Anne Arundel County (Md.) Public Library, commented very dryly that patrons’ “‘helpful’ suggestions and often actual attempts to assist the librarian are greatly appreciated. It is especially helpful when they try to upgrade our software for us.” I’d say a significant percentage of the security measures on our public computers is directed at people who think they are doing us a favor by reconfiguring our setup or installing groovy new beta software guaranteed to wreak havoc on the rest of our system.
Finally, there is a whole category you could call “completely unclear on the concept.” Every hour in our library we make the rounds of the public computers, and I usually take the opportunity to ask people if their computers are functioning well. One day a young woman frantically flagged me down. I leaned toward her, waiting for a high-tech question, and she whispered, “Do you know how to spell ‘cum laude’?”
Okay, it’s not serious—it’s funny; and it’s one reason why working in libraries is so delightful. Remember that you’re not laughing at the patrons; you’re laughing at those weird appliances they have to use. Only in Windows, as one novice pointed out to me, do you have to go to Start in order to Shut Down.