Ms. Jenn Wright from the University of Michigan will be presenting the results of an exciting study on electronic resources troubleshooting. Please join us for our Midwinter meeting in Chicago:
Electronic Outages: Who Broke It? How Long Was It Broken? We’re…Tracking That, Right?
In the rush to fix electronic outages as swiftly as possible, it can be easy to miss connections and overall trends in favor of focusing on the immediate concern: restoring access to users. This represents a missed opportunity to address overarching themes and longstanding issues with particular resources.
Thanks to a ticketing system implemented in 2013, we at the University of Michigan are now able to look back at a year’s worth of electronic troubleshooting and analyze data gathered over some 1600 separate outages. With fields to denote which party caused a problem, and whether it was related to metadata, bundled content, holdings or a host of other issues, we are able to speak to a year’s worth of outages in more detailed and data-driven a fashion than we have been able to before. With the ability to report out from the system and compare outages across vendor, type and duration, we are better able to inform our discussions about what works for electronic resources, and what may need to be improved.
In this presentation I will highlight the results of our retrospective, touching on the top outages we tend to encounter, which vendors we tend to encounter them from, and how we might improve upon our own record-keeping practices in order to better capture the nuances of outages in the future.