{"id":2272,"date":"2008-03-25T17:31:56","date_gmt":"2008-03-25T22:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.librarysupportstaff.org\/?p=525"},"modified":"2008-03-25T17:31:56","modified_gmt":"2008-03-25T22:31:56","slug":"the-accidental-opac-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/25\/the-accidental-opac-name.html","title":{"rendered":"The Accidental OPAC Name"},"content":{"rendered":"

Someone at AskMetaFilter has inquired about why so many library OPACs have human names<\/a>, and Jessamyn has asked for comments<\/a>, so here is what I posted as a reply:<\/p>\n

Here’s a story about how one library accidentally gave their OPAC a personal name:<\/p>\n

In 1999 I was working at a community college library, and we were about to go live with our first ILS.\u00a0 Judie, a staff member who had been with the library since it had opened, had retired the day before the server was to be installed.\u00a0 I had been promoted to her position, and so found myself, freshly promoted, standing in the server room with a half-dozen people watching the Sun technician set everything up.<\/p>\n

The Sun tech announced that he would need a name for the server.\u00a0 “Library” was the first one suggested.\u00a0 I recall that I suggested “Herman”, after George Harrison’s favorite drink.\u00a0 Someone else suggested “Judie”.\u00a0 We all thought it was fitting.<\/p>\n

Of course, we later found out that the name became part of the address of the server (http:\/\/judie.foo.bar) and that we couldn’t change it without a great deal of messiness.\u00a0 I felt we should go with the situation and and personalize the OPAC, but it didn’t happen.<\/p>\n

Five years later we bought a new server, changed the name to “Library” (and changed all our bookmarks, handouts, etc.) and went forth with a good, solid, generic name for the server.<\/p>\n

The best memory, for me, was that the real Judie wouldn’t believe me (or anyone else) about the server being named after her.\u00a0 I think it was several months before she finally accepted that we weren’t pulling some practical joke on her….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone at AskMetaFilter has inquired about why so many library OPACs have human names, and Jessamyn has asked for comments, so here is what I posted as a reply: Here’s a story about how one library accidentally gave their OPAC … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2940,2943],"tags":[3794,4635,4703],"class_list":["post-2272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ils","category-libraries","tag-george-harrison","tag-staff-member","tag-sun-technician"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSU5g-AE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.libology.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}