Hi all,

I'm hoping I can prod the collective wisdom about a perennial problem here
at our library: What to do when a patron comes in with something on their
phone to be printed, but for whatever reason they cannot use a computer to
retrieve it (for instance in the case where they do not remember their
password.)

Often, due to frustrations on the part of either the patron or front-line
staff, the solution ends up being to email the reference account with an
attachment that the librarian opens and prints. This obviously carries
significant security and privacy risks. It is, however, absolutely seamless
and generally understood by most everyone.

So I am wondering if people have thoughts about how to approach the problem
and possible avenues to explore. Some ideas I've kicked around with our IT
consultant are: somehow scripting CUPS to control access to print jobs or
using an online file uploader such as uppy.io to send stuff to a cloud
provider that staff can print directly from without downloading files and
executing them locally. I would prefer open-source solutions. I am not a
developer, though I consider myself something of a professionalized script
kiddie. I can implement well-documented methods with some trial and error.
Wild, hacked-together, piecemeal ideas welcome!

My absolute pie-in-the-sky dream would be to have a dedicated machine for
quick one-off print jobs like this. The patron would email a specific
address and go over to the machine. They would enter their identifier
(library card number, name, whatever pseudonym they might choose) and the
system would only show the emails belonging to them. From there, they could
print the emails/attachments as they normally would. The computer would be
managed like any other public access machine--separated into a public
subnet and have session management software installed. This seems at least
theoretically doable with Google's (who we use) own APIs/scripting, but I'm
not going to build a whole email client just for my particular use case.

I know that there are vendor solutions such as PrinterOn, and while I am
willing to consider them, I have so far been unimpressed. At my previous
work, I used PrinterOn but I found it to be unintuitive and dated-looking.
If I am going to justify the cost for an ongoing subscription, I would like
the product to meet a level of UX comparable to modern commercial services.
However, It is more than possible that I haven't seen everything out there.


Thanks for any help you can provide,
Andrew
--
Andrew Ward (he/him/his)
Digital Services Librarian
Troy Public Library
100 Second Street
Troy, New York 12180
(518) 274-7071