Notes from 6 May 2013 Meeting

Attendees: 8

Location: CUNY Graduate Center, lower level of the Mina Rees Library

Discussions

Conversation ranged far and wide across topics:

• Survey of wifi in CUNY libraries (results are here). If anyone wants a copy of the individual responses from each school, please contact Stephen Francoeur.
  • There is also a separate report that Curtis Kendrick put together recently after he polled the chief librarians about wireless access at their libraries.
• Printing from wireless devices
  • not usually an option at most campus
  • Lehman has an “wireless printing” option that lets users send print jobs as an email attachment to the Pharos printing system
  • Baruch students can install a printer driver for wireless printing on Windows laptops but not Macs or any other OS
• Logins for wifi vs. deskstop
  • easier at some campuses than others
  • some schools still not requiring login for selected desktop machines
  • some school require burdensome hurdles to be cleared before wireless access can be set up on a student’s device
• CUNY internet network
  • Manhattan campuses are on fiber, campuses in the other boroughs will be getting fiber in the coming years
  • Load balancing as an issue
  • Redirecting databases page to CUNY A-Z list of databsases when your library site is down
  • Speed test/stress test for campus wifi networks
• Teaching with mobile devices
  • Laptop carts/storage in the classroom (charging batteries is a challenge)
  • Baruch is getting a laptop/iPad checkout kiosk soon; such a setup might work in a classroom too if you wanted a wireless classroom
• Checkouts of mobile devices
  • Most campuses only check out iPads and no Android or Windows tablets (why?)
  • Google Chromebook as laptop loan option?
  • Baruch’s technology loans page

Next Meeting

June 3 (first Monday of the month) at 9:30. Location TBD. Those of us working on usability testing of mobile services/tech will discuss what we’ve learned and what questions we still have.