By Jennifer Wright, WSU MLIS Candidate

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. This presentation provided an overview of the newly-implemented tracking process for electronic resources at the University of Michigan, which allows for greater and more detailed data than they had previously collected on which vendors' products are failing to perform, how often, and in what ways. While the resulting data are well-placed to inform future purchasing decisions, they do raise questions about where responsibility lies when it comes to long-term issues that all parties (publishers, content providers, and institutions) are aware of, yet which none of them has fixed. Of particular note are issues regarding faulty metadata distributed widely across the purchasing environment, holdings and their maintenance as ownership of resources changes hands, and the functioning (or lack thereof) of OpenURL link resolvers with open-access content and bundled abstracts and reviews.

After several months of testing, implementation rolled out in spring of 2013, and served to support many of the initial decisions made regarding vendors and outage types tracked. Tweaks made during the learning curve phase involved deciding whether to adopt a priority system, the extent to which to utilize the timer, how do rationalize the policy decisions of other workspaces within the outages workspace, and when to enact dynamic vs. static linking. Having a programmer well-versed in the creation of Footprints implementations across the Library greatly aided both the planning stages as well as the few months of growing pains prior to the production phase.

Initial findings provided a number of surprises, ranging from the fact that, while memorably thorny to resolve, problems regarding the proxy server makeup the merest fraction of total outages. Additionally, those vendors or outage types anecdote might have ranked as occurring quite often, did not always come across that way in the statistics. Because of the inability to fix, for example, bundled content issues, tracking them and providing the appropriate response does not take long, and they do not loom large in the troubleshooters' consciousness. However, bundled content problems account for a great number of outages experienced, though they remain unfixed either by content providers or link resolver vendors. Additionally, a number of outage types previously undistinguished from each other in the "Other" free-text problem type field have been highlighted for separate categories of their own in the future. These include User Error (where there is in fact no outage), Temporary Glitch (where the outage was momentary and unable to be reproduced by the time troubleshooters came to fix it), and Concurrent User Limits (where users are unable to access a resource because the maximum number of users are already viewing the resource). All in all, the case study serves to highlight access issues both prominent and insidious with regard to electronic resources in large institutional libraries.