Dear Mark,

We've had a great deal of success using Happ Control trackballs.  They
manufacture arcade-quality devices that are as close to indestructable as
anything I've seen.  I think you can even buy PC and Mac adaptors to
connect 'em to your desktop computer.  I can give you the address of one of
our tech folks if you're interested.

As far as restricting where visitors can go, I have this experience to
offer.  Since the whole premise of the Web is making information
accessible, limiting access is a real tough task.  None of the filtering
software I've seen completely safeguards against users getting to the
naughty stuff. All of the software I've previewed requires you to subscribe
to the vendors service so they can keep sending you up-to-date lists of
where you can't go. You need to factor in not only the cost of buying the
software, but the cost of staying subscribed.  Without any hard data on how
many visitors would try to misuse your computer, it's hard to justify the
expense of filtering software.

To get an idea of how much of a problem this might be at our institution, I
set up a public access terminal in our Atrium a couple of years ago as an
experiment.  It was a Mac with no keyboard, only a trackball and button and
it ran a version of Netscape that had virtually everything disabled.  I had
a small site sitting locally on the machine that served as a quick tutorial
on how to browse the web and at end had a screen of six different
categories (Science, Current Events, Entertainment, etc...) that had some
pre-screened links to major sites like CNN, PBS, and the like.

After several months of constant use in a high-traffic area, I was pleased
to find that I could count on one hand the number of times visitors were
found to be viewing innapropriate material.  Several factors contributed to
this.  The lack of a keyboard was the most significant.  Without the
ability to enter URLs or go to a search engine, most of those inclined to
mischief quickly got bored.  We also had a 30" slave monitor above the
computer so everybody in the Atrium could see what you were doing.  This
also tended to inhibit innapropriate behavior.  The location was another
factor.  A highly-visible place in a busy area is not where hooligans want
to play.  There was a slight correlation between the amount of times people
tried to crash the machine and the times when the Atrium was less-crowded.


My quick and dirty evaluation of people using the device was that around
70% never went beyond the list of sites I'd given them links to.  They'd
pick a link, browse it, and then return to my menu to choose another link.


As far as reliability goes, neither Netscape nor MSIE are great.  At our
best, we were rebooting once or twice a day over 12 hours.

Good luck,

Ed

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Edward Rodley            email:           [log in to unmask]

Exhibit Planner             ph:           617.589.0296
Museum of Science,         fax:           617.742.2246
Boston, MA
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