Paul McCloskey
I hope that you will forgive the disappointment of receiving a hand written letter only to find the content is a work related subject! I write to convay the senserity of the subject and its implication, opposed to writting a heat-of-the-moment email 'rant'. The following issue is, I believe important to giving the public and library users an excellent service. The issue is, Scanning facilities. Here at the Reference library in central we receive a daily amount of request on using a scanner. These requests can be important to the public. The most recent one 14:30 3/4/18 was a request to scan documents which need to be then sent or uploaded in order to process a council tax registration. The Xerox workstation here has scanning facilties that are set up and functional, however I have to tell our library users that we dont offer the scanning facility, rather than lie or make up an answer which is often the case, I often tell them that I dont know why. which forces a lack of service.
This is becoming rather frustrating, not in the way of a pridicable line of request but the ambiguous reasons why I and my colluegs have to refuse them. I have been told since starting this position last Febuary that Scanning cannot be allowed as there may be a security risk in inserting a USB in the the xerox workstation which was instucted by email a few years ago. I brought this up with fiona myles for an update on this a while ago as there is a number of fixes such has having a library owned USB which can be singed out to users and keeping the software antivirus updated which can be acheaved quite ruguly by logging onto the xerox using the details that is printed out when it is turned on in the mornings. A reply from Fiona was changed to Scanning cannot be allowed due to Data Protection as xerox stores data? As the scanning facilities offer so much to our users I see it as being very important that the issue is given the green light. Is there an option to turn off the recording of data. I am sure the the technical help office of Xerox can suggest ways that will make it compatable with data protection rights. I plead you to resolve this issue as the teirs of managemt that I have brought this up with have their hands tied. I can offer to communicate with Xerox to resolve this issue as I have looked into the settings of the xerox workstations before. Best wishes Ross Hannay