If O’Reilly ever gets around to publishing a Voyager Annoyances volume, I think the stealthy way the OPAC times out (without any warning or ability to extend your session) will be in the first chapter. We’ve run a Voyager OPAC for 9 years or so and that has always been a problem. OK, so just bump up the timeout value to some ridiculous number and forget about it, right? No, it seems most people do an OPAC search and then go on to something else (that is, they don’t log out) so the server maintains the session until the timeout value is reached—with 300+ desktops in our libraries (and who knows how many users beyond our walls), that can bring the server to it’s knees on a busy day.
A couple of days ago a colleague asked me why a place like Cornell had a timeout warning feature on their Voyager OPAC and we didn’t? I hate questions like that but then again, that’s how a lot of good things start. So I went to Cornell’s catalog and started poking around. They had a pop-up window that appeared when a session was about to time out and offered a button to click to extend the session. Along the bottom status bar of the browser, I noticed a little countdown timer. That was my clue—did a “view source” and discovered it was indeed a javascript function, stored in “/js/timer.js”
Thanks to Google, a simple “timer.js” search brought back as the “feeling lucky” hit a webpage from Jim Robinson of Tarrant County College. There I found he was in fact the developer of the code Cornell was using but he was now making an improved version (2.0) available. The new version uses DHTML instead of pop-ups which was exactly what I was looking for (seems everyone’s blocking popups these days).
Grabbed the files and following his excellent directions, I had a functioning “timeout warning” feature added to our OPAC in just a few minutes. As I finished testing it, I thought “…too bad my annual evaluation was done weeks ago, getting this rock out of my shoe after 9 long years is a pretty big deal.” Of course, on further reflection, I realized that if it took me this long to fix it, I’d really better keep quiet about it.