Identifying In-House Computers

Computers that are networked and registered in Polaris Administration as workstations are always considered to be in-house, but you may also want to consider other, non-networked computers as in-house. The following situations are some examples:

Public access computers in the library use Polaris PowerPAC, which is Web-based. You may want to set a patron inactivity timeout on these computers, so that patrons are automatically logged off after a specified period of time.
You want to limit certain library services, such as patron access to specific third-party databases (e-sources), so that they are available only to Polaris PowerPAC computers located in the library.
Some locations may use different Internet service providers, or different network domains. You may not be able to register these computers in Polaris as workstations because of network security settings.
Wireless networks or public network connections allow patrons to connect to the catalog with their own laptop computers, but the library wants to include these computers in statistical reports on in-house library usage.

To identify a non-networked computer as in-house, you add its specific IP address to the In-House IP Addresses table. You can open the In-House IP Addresses table from the organization workform or the Administration Explorer.

Note:
If a workstation record was set up in Polaris Administration, the workstation is automatically considered an in-house location. Do not list it in the In-House IP Addresses table. A computer is considered remote if neither the registered workstation nor the IP address is found in the Polaris system.

You can then determine whether the system checks the In-House IP Addresses table alone or both the In-House IP Addresses table and the workstations registered in Polaris to determine whether a workstation is in-house. You can set separate criteria for patron inactivity timeout and e-source access.