William S. Peterson asked:
>>> But nearly everyone nowadays is accustomed to using his/her laptop
in coffee shops, airports, hotels, and other hot spots; why shouldn't we
be able to do it in library reading rooms?
You can -- as long as the institution has set up a hot spot in (or that
extends into) the reading room. And if they have, you can get to the
internet and do whatever you could do on the internet from any other hot
spot (including logging into restricted data bases at your home
institution, logging into data bases to which you personally subscribe,
checking email accounts, etc.). What you typically cannot do is log
into data bases hosted by the institution in whose reading room you are
working and to which access is restricted by contract with a vendor. To
do that requires the level of privilege that you have at your home
institution -- and that privilege is difficult (impossible?) to provide
without opening holes in the general institutional IT security policy.
In other words, if I am in my reading room (or at my desk), I can
connect wirelessly and log into restricted resources to which Iowa
subscribes as easily as I can from a hard-wired connection to our
network (or from my home computer) because I have an active username and
password and use them. If I am in your reading room, I can probably
connect back to Iowa with roughly equal ease, again using my Iowa
username and password. But if I'm working at Maryland, I probably cannot
directly access resources to which Maryland subscribes -- because I do
not have a valid Maryland username and password.
Cordially ----------- Sid Huttner, The University of Iowa Libraries