Text-based OPAC?

["David Brennan" <dbrennan at pts dot edu>]

Good morning-

In our library, we have several OPACs that are in very remote locations and are unsupervised for long periods. When they were as fully capable as our other OPACs, there were problems with misuse.
What we have done at this point is to force them to use the text-based catalog. However, this still requires a PC with Windows, and up until now, we've just absorbed these in our lease cycle. It seems a waste to me to make a 2.4GHz PC into a dumb terminal, so in order to cut a few PCs from our next lease cycle, I'm investigating replacing these with either extremely ancient PCs running DOS and a telnet client or a dedicated dumb terminal.
As for the PC option, I've gotten one to boot and get an IP address, but haven't yet figured out how I'll telnet into III - I'm a bit rusty at messing with all of the configurations, packet drivers and the like. I have no idea if there is a dumb terminal which is capable of DHCP and telnet - we have a few left from our old DRA system, but they run over the proprietary cabling from 10 years ago - no luck there.
Has anyone had experience with this type of setup?
Thanks,

David

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David Brennan, MLS
Electronic Services Librarian
Clifford E. Barbour Library
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
616 N. Highland Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15206
412-441-3304 x2256
412-362-2329 (FAX)
dbrennan at pts dot edu
http://www.barbourlibrary.org
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Ignorance must certainly be bliss or there wouldn't be so many people so resolutely pursuing it.
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