Good news for KCMO Public Library patrons, but if you live near a Mid-Continent Public Library branch-

-and if you're reading this blog, you probably already know what I didn't back in November when I opined that Mid-Continent would be ripe for setting up free wireless, and have just managed to confirm: They already have Wi-Fi in many of their locations, but it's play-for-pay through AT&T. Strange, that. They don't hire a vendor to charge you for borrowing or even just sitting down and reading a book right there in the library, but doing the same thing with a website in a manner that frees up the use of a library workstation for someone else who really needs it requires you to take a credit-card hit.

I've heard of public libraries in other parts of the country doing this, but never really thought I'd see it around here. I'm really curious as to Mid-Continent's rationale for going this route. Why should taxpayers essentially be forced to pay twice for something in this manner? And were the potential legal ramifications fully considered? One would think the library would be on rather tenuous ground if it attempted to enforce its acceptable use policy against someone who for all intents and purposes is an AT&T customer whom they observed doing what would constitute a violation if it were done on the library's computers or network (neither of which the patron would be using). As an alternative, under their behavior policy they might be able to give him or her the bum's rush for harassment or creating a disturbance, but even this could backfire on them, given that the offending party was paying someone else for access to whatever it was they had problems with.

Also, if I'm a laptop user who for whatever reason doesn't have a credit card, I suppose the library and its patrons are OK with me putting even more pressure on their beleaguered workstations.

If you're with MCPL, or if you're a district patron or taxpayer and would care to weigh in with a response to this either pro or con, I'd love it if you'd leave a comment.

Oh, I almost forgot-now for the good news. According to a response left by someone in the Kansas City, Missouri Public Library's information technology department to a question on their website's message board, all of their branch locations will be unwired by the end of June. Now this will be a momentous happening, since not only will it make KCMO the first big library system in the area to have done so-with free wireless at least- but I'm pretty certain that their Bluford and Southeast branches will be the only free hotspots in the inner city, if one goes in for euphemisms (or the only ones east of Troost if one does not). If I'm wrong about that, please don't hesitate to leave a comment and let everyone know.

A trend from California I hope we DON'T start seeing here

San Francisco Chronicle
Laptop thieves descend upon wireless cafes
Grab-and-run robbers find pricey computers easy to resell

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/04/08/MNGE9I686K1.DTL

I haven't heard of anything like this happening around KC yet. Has anyone else?

At any rate, let's be careful out there.