I'd suggest that you add this to your policy and state you will hold lost items for 24hrs to allow the owners a chance to recover their items, after this period you will attempt to discover the owner and alert them to the item so they can then collect it.
This would cover you for that minority who would abuse the goodwill, but I must admit the one factor we've never had to deal with is the threat of viruses - off the top of my head you could ensure that the virus checker scans usb's before opening them.
An alternative suggestion is to promote such sites like, http://www.dropbox.com/ which offer large online storage, and so eliminate the potential loss of files through either usbs corrupting or loosing them, best of all it's free.
Stephen Harvey
Learning Resources Service Manager
Hertford Regional College
Scotts Road
Ware
Herts SG12 9JF
(01992) 411680
-----Original Message-----
From: A general Library and Information Science list for news and discussion. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Joanne Carpenter
Sent: 29 September 2010 14:11
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Lost USBs
Hello
Does anyone have a policy on opening usbs that have been left in machines to find out who they belong to? We generally id who they belong to and label them and send the student a message saying where the stick is. However, we have had a student complain that we had opened his, and looked at his documents. I suppose there is a privacy issue, but the alternative is to either let students open them to see if the stick is theirs (if it's not then they have looked at someone else's documents anyway, and they could say the stick is theirs even if it's not) or to destroy them. In every single other case, the students have been overwhelmed with gratitude that we had their stick and they hadn't lost their work!
Regards
Joanne
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