But I couldn’t, not being a student and not being sponsored by a faculty member. What is this, the fucking Huntington Library? Now I do understand that the library isn’t there to serve me, but I do have a card and I’m a life member of the Alumni Association. I’m allowed to sit and read in the library, and I’m allowed to check out books from it. Why not let me use my personal laptop online as well? It’s not as if, by allowing public wi-fi access, they’d be opening themselves up to stampeding herds of the general public overwhelming their limited bandwidth resources. It takes a certain amount of effort to get to UCLA. It’s expensive to park there ($8 that I spent to no useful purpose, as it turned out), so you pretty much really have to have a good reason for wanting to be there. Mine was that I wanted be able to sit in a quiet academic environment while I wrote my final exam (I’m enrolled in a different institution).
I can’t go to my university, it’s forty miles away in the next county and I am attending online. UCLA is about 2 miles away from my home, and I can’t go there.
And it’s not as if the UCLA library was busy. From what I’ve seen, the actual physical libraries with the books and study carrels are never busy any more, a fact which I attribute to the fact that students must be using their laptops from elsewhere on campus to access library resources. But UCLA’s hotspots are all restricted to current members of the campus, a fact that didn’t use to be the case but now has been for the past few years.
Maybe as bandwidth continues to become cheaper they’ll open it up again. That’s usually the way these things work; for instance one used to have to pay about $30 per month to be able to access their library catalog online, but now it’s free to anyone with Internet access. But I’ll be done with my degree by then.
Actually, it is like that. That’s why my employer, a hospital. has eliminated almost all the courtesy phones that were intended for family members of our patients. That’s why we had to put access codes on some copiers in areas the public could get to. People will hear about it, and they will come. You tell me, can people get to the library on a bus, or on foot?
And we are a relatively small midwest business. I imagine at a huge campus like that, they are hard pressed to maintain sufficient band with for even those eligible.
I’b be willing to be there are public access computers in the library with internet access. What you’re really asking for is more comfortable seating to spread out your stuff.
Here at UCD the public access ones are only supposed to be used to search the databases I think. That way they don’t end up with people being unable to find a journal article for their term paper because everyone is using the computers to check their MySpace. And the computer labs require a student or staff login.
I don’t know how this stuff works exactly, but there may be some issues with access to online journals. Typically any connection originated from the subscribing institution will have access to the journals. Their contracts with the journal companies may stipulate that only enrolled students, faculty, and staff are allowed to access, and that they are forbidden from allowing access to anyone else.
And Boyo Jim, those computers may not actually be available to the public. Ours required a login with our campus email name/password.
I don’t know about his, but our public library severely limits the amount of time you can spend online. Getting kicked off after an hour is not conducive to good workflow.
Sure they could, but given the layout and location of the campus, it just isn’t that practical for most people. If this were, let’s say, Columbia in NYC and there was a subway station across the street, then I think you’d have a ‘stampede’ factor. But this is L.A. People don’t like to take the bus, and if you do you still have to walk a long way to get to the library.
There are, but IMO that’s where I’d really be hogging resources inappropriately. The public workstations are there for quick lookups and the like, rather than protracted use.
I should have pointed out in the OP that I wouldn’t mind having to pay a fee to use their wi-fi; under certain situations, like today, it’d be worth it.
At my university, you need to have a student or faculty password to use the Wi-Fi, but if you bring your laptop and an ethernet cable, you can plug into one of the carral or desk sockets without the need for a password.
ETA:
Do you know any UCLA students? I know people at my school who have lent their password to visiting friends for access to campus wi-fi during their stay.
Universities generally don’t have these sorts of rules, although at my school you might be asked to vacate the computer if you’re doing something that cannot reasonably be construed as academic work.
If you’re checking your MySpace page or mucking around with Hotmail or playing Flash games, you might be asked to move. But in general, there’s no limit to the amount of time you can spend on the computer.
Of course, most of the people who use a university library computer are there to do work of some sort, and probably have their own computer at home, so are unlikely to hang around all day doing non-work-related stuff. It’s not like a public library, where you might get lots of people who don’t have regular access to the internet. Poor people, backpackers and other travelers, etc. If public libraries didn’t have time limits, some people would never get off the computers.
There are no ethernet jacks on campus available to the public. If there are, I’d like to know about them, because their Wi-Fi SUCKS. Maybe they should have a pay-to-play offer for off-campus folks, if the revenue would make the network better.
Sorry Spectre, I’d loan my login to you, but I already loan it out to my husband, and it’s set up in such a (dumb if you ask me) way that the Wi-Fi login is the same as your login for pretty much everything, including records etc.
And don’t I wish the library were empty. I’ve already had a 4 page trainwreck on people eating crap in class, but they do the same in the YRL too. Good thing I don’t spend as much time there any more. Around next week it’ll be packed with a million jerks eating apples and Funyuns.
Eh, it works well enough when I can get it connected, but coverage in my area of campus (I spend 80% of my time in Dodd) is spotty at best. YRL coverage is pretty uneven, too. Powell it works fine in, but who wants to dodge the tasers?
Anyways. Good luck on your final exam, and don’t shun campus altogether! It still loves you, just the WiFi doesn’t.
The part that surprises me is that they’re not willing to extend wi-fi privileges to paid-up members of the Alumni Association, if not alums generally. When colleges and universities try to raise money, who do they target first? Alumni.
That’s how my uni does it. If you contribute a certain amount of money each year to the university’s foundation, you get wi-fi and library privileges. (Technically, every alumnus is a member of the alumni association, so they go by foundation contributions.)
And, also at my uni, if you’re accessing the wi-fi on campus, you can search and access the library’s databases. If you’re off-campus, you need a student ID.
Understandably so, since each institution and even each major or degree program within individual departments can have their own standards.
I don’t believe that alums should necessarily get internet access free–we should be on the giving end. But it’d help me so much if I could just pay a few bucks on a per use basis, to be granted access. I have another final to do and I can’t think of any place to go work on it. Except home, of course, but sometimes it’s pretty crazy around here, especially since we have a house guest.
