SPOT Meeting Minutes 2009-12-03Issues the week of November 16th:Why were the problems when reported that afternoon not processed until the next morning? If this was taken care of last night when the issue was reported then the other libraries would not have been as effected. Ralph was out/on vacation this day, is he the only one who would have known how to fix this? If it was not really a load issue, what is the underlying problem to this. When will we get the internal notification system in place. Why 4.5 days to fix this? We feel we really don't need any more lines for communications just some answers of what is really happening. Is there a quicker fix we can come up with should this occur again? Is there a solution you can come up with? Jennifer - Crashing, horrific errors week of 16th - gateway errors, recover on Tuesday, what took so long was going through all of 2000 requests to determine what was causing the errors. New monitoring tools in place, another enhancement - make error reports more granular so we know what happened and what do about it. Should not happen again - at least not this badly. Bill - having responses ahead of time was super helpful. BIG QUESTION - How can we easily change the status of a request, just get the requests moving. Ed - still dangerous to "just proceed" with something - maybe a false negative. What we want to do is let us know a) whether or not it was safe to manually "push" requests through and b) HOW to manually process requests where appropriate. Rick - we asked for this months ago. Ed - we are writing specs now for this. Ron - this still won't fix the problem where if an item is received, we can't receive it again. Bill - will new system keep requests keep requests from getting re-stuck? Jennifer - Yes. New monitoring system should prevent this from happening. This will enable them to deal with problems more quickly. Rick - why took so long? Jennifer - what took so long was to fix was that we had to go through each and every one of them to see what state they were in and understand what to do with them to release them. Didn't want to create more problems - needed to know what action to take on each one. Rick - so what did happen to them? Rick - went into new request queue because it didn't place a hold on our items - what other results did you find? OCLC doesn't always trust the error message. Rick wants to know why 2000 requests that were reported on Tuesday weren't pushed through till Thursday. OCLC believes they did push these through. Ed - will get better now with new monitoring tools. Jennifer - agrees they screwed up big time. Right now they are just letting us know what they did and what they are going to do. BIll - we need a turnaround time agreement for how long after a problem is reported till it is fixed. SECURITY CERTIFICATE exired over the holiday Jennifer - what went wrong, but not an excuse - what went wrong was that sec cert provider didn't notify them that this going to expire, so OCLC didn't monitor/know, so Summit libs had to notify. 1. OCLC is now interally monitoring all security certificates now. Robin Murray ordered lots of audits to take place - engineering audits, support audits, software breakdown, workflow and design failure points, so they a) know what all the failure points are and b) so they can monitor them, etc. FYI - most people did manage to bypass the expired certificate and place requests. Bill - can sympathize to expired certificates. Thinks communications piece is critical. Also, who besides Kyle and Anya will be able to submit Top Desk request? Anya - will there be anything in place to monitor patron user interface? Express the concern that we can't necessarily rely on our patrons to report problems. Ed - thinks Bill's group/project will address that. Jennifer - reiterating, ALL PROBLEMS need to go through Top Desk. Larger group of people monitoring that now. If we don't get a response pretty quickly - call. When we are upgraded to Navigator 1.0 in Feb - all support will move to regular OCLC customer support. There will be a transitional meeting. Patrons should use feedback form that patrons should use. Nancy - does OCLC have reports of the kinds of requests that go into Top Desk. Not really, because they will be moving to a new system. Ok, so when we switch over to just regular Customer support - concern that customer support will not be the expert on Navigator. Ron - there will be a formal handover Jennifer - it never hurts to identify the system/product with which you having problems. Anya - if we're not getting a response from Top Desk or Support - who do we call? Ron - with new monitoring system you should get a response within 2 hours. Rick - worried about problems that have been reported for a long time but not resolved. (Allie - morale is down due in part at least to this issue.). Worried that other libraries are just not reporting problems because have no confidence that they will get resolved. Resorting to work-arounds. Ron - will work with Anya to close resolved issues. Anya - when will UI changes be reflected in Whitman catalog? Jennifer we just did it today. There was a missing alias, but resolved just this morning. Are the time stamps on requests still in CST? Any chance of getting this changed? Jennifer - we have an enhancement ticket open for this but not ETA on when will be changed. Ron - waiting for development. Bill - could you at least just add "EST" to the display? Nancy - yes, just fixed text next to the variable? Ed - will work on it. Why do many entries in the NREOCLC stats reports have blank title fields? Ralph - turned back over to Pillar people - folks who do stats. OCLC just passes an OCLC number to them ... Could we tell NRE all requests that come to you are a returnable. Jennifer - not really. Describe problem of locals, annuals, etc. There are about 10 libraries who are swinging one way another alot in terms of lending. Heidi sent alliance staff basically a polygraph of the swings. Are there really two rotas being used, why then the high and low we are experiencing? Same rota just being copied. Can we get some documentation on how the rota works. Ralph - the only thing that changes is that each week they have a new set of data to recalculate rota 1. Kyle - can we add a third rota? Ralph - no. Date last requested method might be better. Anya - we haven't had these wild swings until recently - what has changed? Kyle - problem: requesting volume is not stable, therefore the rota building can't be accurate. Anya - how long since run a patron privacy? Ralph - a while. Ed is going to start running these calls - should we need a third point of contact if communications are failing, talk with Ed! Removing patrons Can
someone summarize the response to this? I feel like I didn't hear
anything conclusive at all, but I want to confirm that. I think we need
to revisit this, perhaps. At least, I know my librarians have pretty
large concerns about these behaviors, with regard to privacy, etc. -af Allie
I don't think we discussed it at all (at least, not that I recall). I
think we ran short of time. I guess we should add it to next meeting's
agenda?
I
thought I heard it come up for about two seconds, but I may have
totally hallucinated it, it wouldn't be the first time. Let's add it to
the next agenda, please. I mean, I don't really have a dog in this
fight, but it seems like the less patron data we are sitting on for no
reason the better?-afI have patron records from April of this year not yet deleted:
|