Patron registration is the front door to any managed Public Access Computing system. Patron registration is the first step to providing fair access, session management, and print job management. Patron registration gives patrons a key to the workstations preventing those without keys, from jumping the queue and taking over. It also ensures librarians can know which users are on which station if they need to find out how much time it left, extend, or terminate a session.
The Odyssey system is unique in that when a patron registers to use a workstation, user space with a username and password is created on each managed system. This means that a workstation will only recognize registered users. It also means that when users save work on a workstation, provided the library allows the option, the files associated with that save work remain secure in the user's space until such time as the userspace is purged from the workstation. This feature allows an authorized librarian to recover work which otherwise might have been lost as long as the patron can present the key. User space is typically deleted after 7 days. This time, though, is defined by the library and can range from the close of the session until there is no longer space on the hard drive to save any more files.
This feature means that a patron who may have worked on a document for an hour does not lose their work if they forget
to print it, copy it to a removable media, or e-mail it, or in the event of a system anomoly, e.g. power failure. A librarian
can recover it for them at any time within the purge period.
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