Library catalogue 'time-out' increased

“The time-out period has been increased from 5 to 10 minutes, and we are looking at extending this to 15 minutes in the near future. This will make a lot of users happy and save some frustration caused by lost searches,” said the library’s systems manager, Mr Simon Huggard.

Mr. Huggard said that the library had long been aware that the time-out period was a cause for complaint, but has previously been unable to extend the time out due to software licence restrictions.

“In the customer satisfaction survey we conducted last year there were numerous complaints about the catalogue ’timing-out’ during a session, which basically means that your connection to the catalogue has been terminated due to inactivity.”

Mr Huggard said the extended time out period would alleviate problems for many users with slower internet connections at home, as well as others who leave the catalogue to view electronic journals or scanned PDF images and then find they can't get back to their search results when they hit the 'back' button in their browser.

“Basically there was a direct correlation between the number of licences we had for simultaneous users and the time-out period – we had limited licenses which meant that we had to limit the amount of seemingly inactive connection time to let new users onto the system.”

Ms Janette Burke, Director Information Systems, explained that it is a compromise that no longer has to be made, because the library had been able to purchase unlimited licenses for simultaneous users.

6 October 2004

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