![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
The library leaves the computers on while we're open, so as to have minimal time needed to wait for them to boot up and be ready to go for anyone who comes in the door. It makes us slightly energy-inefficient, but it's a lot better than having people tapping their toes for three to six minutes while the boot process completes and they can finally go about their Internet usage. We have a script at the end of a session that wipes user data and then reboots the machine to a working state, so there's no need to engage in manual shutdowns with regard to any sort of regular library business. Yet, every morning, when I survey the machines to make sure they're all ready for the people that will be coming, I will inevitably find one or two or more that have been shut down overnight and have to be readied for the morning.
I'm sure that some of this is people practicing the habits they learned elsewhere. At home, perhaps the computer is always off unless it's being actively used. Or at a previous workplace, they turned the computers off in the evening. Perhaps they believe that the only way for their information to be truly secure and deleted is to turn the machine off after they are done. Purely innocuous behavior. It does make things more difficult, though, because the IT folk run updates, push new images, and otherwise handle the management and maintenance of our computers that doesn't require physically swapping hardware bits while we're not open. If a computer doesn't get their updates in the night, that can often cause a problem where the computer gets stuck in a loop of trying to update itself, getting stopped by the software and system policies we have that prevents system changes when in a locked-down mode, and then reboots itself to try and install the updates again. (That's easily fixed enough with a work order to IT, but it does mean a little extra work for them that could have been avoided.)
A majority of the turned-off computers tend to be in the teen area. Sometimes it's because they reached underneath and unplugged the computer itself so they could get an outlet to charge phones and other devices with, and then they forgot to plug the computer back in. (Our library design is less than elegant when it comes to having enough outlets everywhere people want to be.) And given that our teen area can also have keyboards with switched keys, monitors with odd orientations, keyboard layouts left in Cyrillic or Hangul, and a lot of candy wrapper and other food detritus around, some of those turned-off machines might also be teenagers thinking that they're pulling grand acts of mischief, when it's more of an annoyance to have to turn them all on again after they've been shut down for the night. It comes with the territory of serving teenagers and the brains they have that make otherwise bad ideas sound really good when in the company of other teenagers. Not exactly a great harm here, either.
Computers off in the children's area is probably much the same - caregivers trying to instill good computer habits in their children, and so the machines are occasionally off in the morning. At least one person I heard, though, wanted to turn off all the computers in the children's area so that their child would not be distracted by the visuals and would be able to concentrate. And then had proceeded to do so without consulting anyone about it, which is how I got to hear their justification for having done so when I politely explained to them that they are not the only people in the children's area, and we have study rooms and other remedies for people who need a distraction-free environment to do their work in.
For as many people as I hear complaining about computers in the children's area as dumbing them down by letting the children stare slack-jawed at a screen while they're in the library or encouraging the apparent latent attention deficit present in every child now, there are caregivers who are quite glad to have them there, because it allows that caregiver to be able to conduct their library business with a minimum of fuss or distraction to their part, or whose children enjoy playing educational games that will help them exercise their brains for a bit. Some of the grumpiest grumps, of course, will have an entire day care room's worth of children and then sit and read in the area while their children go about doing things - normally not a problem, until it's apparent that the caregiver has no intention of making sure their children behave while they're in the library unless it gets well past the point of intervention from our end.
It's a small thing, really, in the scheme of things, and it gets taken care of in the morning, along with all the other checks to make sure the library is ready in the morning to welcome everyone back from the previous day. It's not a thing they cover in library school, though - how do you find a way to get people to do things against their habits, or against their instincts, or against their prankish intent, so that things run more smoothly, while also keeping your response scaled to the severity of the thing itself? That's probably one of those things that they cover in managerial training, or something.
The library leaves the computers on while we're open, so as to have minimal time needed to wait for them to boot up and be ready to go for anyone who comes in the door. It makes us slightly energy-inefficient, but it's a lot better than having people tapping their toes for three to six minutes while the boot process completes and they can finally go about their Internet usage. We have a script at the end of a session that wipes user data and then reboots the machine to a working state, so there's no need to engage in manual shutdowns with regard to any sort of regular library business. Yet, every morning, when I survey the machines to make sure they're all ready for the people that will be coming, I will inevitably find one or two or more that have been shut down overnight and have to be readied for the morning.
I'm sure that some of this is people practicing the habits they learned elsewhere. At home, perhaps the computer is always off unless it's being actively used. Or at a previous workplace, they turned the computers off in the evening. Perhaps they believe that the only way for their information to be truly secure and deleted is to turn the machine off after they are done. Purely innocuous behavior. It does make things more difficult, though, because the IT folk run updates, push new images, and otherwise handle the management and maintenance of our computers that doesn't require physically swapping hardware bits while we're not open. If a computer doesn't get their updates in the night, that can often cause a problem where the computer gets stuck in a loop of trying to update itself, getting stopped by the software and system policies we have that prevents system changes when in a locked-down mode, and then reboots itself to try and install the updates again. (That's easily fixed enough with a work order to IT, but it does mean a little extra work for them that could have been avoided.)
A majority of the turned-off computers tend to be in the teen area. Sometimes it's because they reached underneath and unplugged the computer itself so they could get an outlet to charge phones and other devices with, and then they forgot to plug the computer back in. (Our library design is less than elegant when it comes to having enough outlets everywhere people want to be.) And given that our teen area can also have keyboards with switched keys, monitors with odd orientations, keyboard layouts left in Cyrillic or Hangul, and a lot of candy wrapper and other food detritus around, some of those turned-off machines might also be teenagers thinking that they're pulling grand acts of mischief, when it's more of an annoyance to have to turn them all on again after they've been shut down for the night. It comes with the territory of serving teenagers and the brains they have that make otherwise bad ideas sound really good when in the company of other teenagers. Not exactly a great harm here, either.
Computers off in the children's area is probably much the same - caregivers trying to instill good computer habits in their children, and so the machines are occasionally off in the morning. At least one person I heard, though, wanted to turn off all the computers in the children's area so that their child would not be distracted by the visuals and would be able to concentrate. And then had proceeded to do so without consulting anyone about it, which is how I got to hear their justification for having done so when I politely explained to them that they are not the only people in the children's area, and we have study rooms and other remedies for people who need a distraction-free environment to do their work in.
For as many people as I hear complaining about computers in the children's area as dumbing them down by letting the children stare slack-jawed at a screen while they're in the library or encouraging the apparent latent attention deficit present in every child now, there are caregivers who are quite glad to have them there, because it allows that caregiver to be able to conduct their library business with a minimum of fuss or distraction to their part, or whose children enjoy playing educational games that will help them exercise their brains for a bit. Some of the grumpiest grumps, of course, will have an entire day care room's worth of children and then sit and read in the area while their children go about doing things - normally not a problem, until it's apparent that the caregiver has no intention of making sure their children behave while they're in the library unless it gets well past the point of intervention from our end.
It's a small thing, really, in the scheme of things, and it gets taken care of in the morning, along with all the other checks to make sure the library is ready in the morning to welcome everyone back from the previous day. It's not a thing they cover in library school, though - how do you find a way to get people to do things against their habits, or against their instincts, or against their prankish intent, so that things run more smoothly, while also keeping your response scaled to the severity of the thing itself? That's probably one of those things that they cover in managerial training, or something.
