Software fully functional

Thank you for your patience over the past weeks while we worked out some technical problems with Ask a Librarian.

I am happy to report that the system has now been returned to its full functionality. Thanks to CCLA Staff (especially Doug and Bruce) and Docutek the problem has been fixed. Statistics, patron login parameters in emails and chat sessions are all restored.

We are continuing to work to resolve the cause of this issue. It was caused, in part, by our online statistics database. Whenever a certain statistic was called for it would require enough resources to bring the server to a standstill. One of the things we have done to eliminate this problem is to only keep recent statistics online. Older stats have been archived and we can retrieve anything prior to April 1st, 2007 for you that you might need.

Since we have discovered that looking up statistics can slow down our system so dramatically, we need to ask you to limit your use of the statistics module to early mornings, before we open at 10 AM, whenever possible. This will help keep things running smoothly for everyone using live chat. We appreciate your cooperation with this and hope that it doesn’t cause too much inconvenience.

Please let us know if you still experience any problems with the system or notice anything unusual.