The Rogue Scholar

Recovering When Blackboard Goes 'Poof!'

Our content/course management system (we use Blackboard v. 6.3) has gone Poof!

The problem had been developing for some time. All the signs were there. Files would go missing for days or longer, and sometimes would simply not return. Log-in problems for both students and faculty were consistent if randomly dispersed throughout the respective bodies of users. Calls and e-mails to the Blackboard tech support hub were sometimes helpful, and sometimes not. Sometimes they were ignored completely.

And yet, we took heart that we were running version 6.3 of their software, an ostensibly stable version as opposed to, say, the most recent 8.0, which is now recognized by CUNY's IT department (which adopted it wholesale upon its release) as a Blood And Sweat Sucking Techno-Leech from Hell. But that was CUNY's problem, not ours. We were smarter.

Last Thursday we lost Blackboard. More specifically, students and faculty lost the ability to log in to the system, and so were unable to access the files stored therein. Faculty couldn't upload grades, and students couldn't upload their homework or access past or current projects. 

A meeting was held at a high level of the school's administration.  One member of the committee wanted us to say nothing about the lack of access for fear of spreading panic. But we are currently in our last week of classes here, and finals start next week. And students and faculty already know that something is horribly wrong with Blackboard. So saying nothing merely shuts them out of a real situation that demands (and commands) their attention. Once that starts, then they really will panic, and that's what we'd like to avoid. So, we sent out an e-mail telling everyone that Blackboard was unavailable and we had no idea what was going to happen. Students were directed to talk to their professors and work out some arrangements for delivery of homework and final exams.

And that's where we are, one week later. Our IT guys are working with Blackboard but the outcome is far from certain and those files inside the system are still unavailable.  The lesson here should be clear as mountain air: never rely on a single electronic storage medium for mission critical data.

It's doubly annoying for those of us who consider ourselves (or are considered by those not) tech-savvy. A lot of us take these electronic systems which we rely on for so very much in our work and personal lives for granted. The technophiles among us, both students and faculty, were doing exactly that--relying on the system--because they had faith in it. Ironically, the technophobes are the ones who got off the lightest: they never used Blackboard much and so lost very little when it went bust. 

Anyway, there are simple things to do when this stuff happens:

1. First, choose reality. I know that sounds harsh, but reality says that machines fail and they often do so when we need them the most. Sometimes they can't be made to unfail. That leads to the second point, which is:

2. Backups. Backup everything and often and in several different ways.  Personally, my backups include hard copy and a flash drive. But there is no reason to stop there. I'm looking into on-line storage and a dedicated external hard drive as well.

3. Diversify. Ideally, you want your most valuable work to live in a combination of diverse places, so that if one craps out, it doesn't take the others with them. Hard copy at the office, plus a dedicated hard drive at home, plus your hard drive on your laptop, makes a good example. Backing up your work to three drives residing on the same network might not make as much sense.

4. Communicate. Students and professors (or employers and employees) need to know what each other needs to do right by the other. The only way to get that going is to talk to each other. And both sides need to understand that things happen and sometimes alternate courses of action are needed. 

This, too will pass, but since luck favors the prepared, it's a lesson worth internalizing sooner rather than later.

A Long and Wacky Week

I haven't been posting lately for simple reasons. The most prominent one being that this week we endured a visit by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. (This is the organization under which our accreditation is formed and periodically verified.) Their crew of educators and administrations visited on Monday and Tuesday, spoke to us in the library and every other department, scaring the bejeesus out of everyone in the process, I'm sure. Certainly we in the school library spent buckets of time making sure that anything these nice people wanted to see could be presented with as  few problems and in as effective a manner possible.

Well, the came, they saw, they asked many questions and on Wednesday they presented their generally positive findings. We're here for five more years as an accredited institution. (Yea!)

Wednesday was April 1, a.k.a April Fool's Day. Two things happened to me personally that made my life more interesting than I really cared for. The first was my wife who woke me up that morning saying, "I opened all the bills and put them on your desk. They're not bad. April Fool! They're really really bad!"

(I love my wife. I want to say that again. I love that woman more than I can describe in non X-rated language. But sometimes . . . yeah. Well. Guys, you know what I mean. Probably you ladies do as well. . .)

I got to work at 10 Wednesday morning and had just unlocked the door to my office when my boss pulled me aside and asked me to cover the desk until further notice. His reasoning was that the place was empty and he and the library manager needed to go to the Middle States presentation downstairs. No problem. I do a shift at the desk every day and since  we're not quite in finals week it shouldn't be too busy, so I'm there.

Then I find out that the public computers were not connecting to the internet. None of them. The private PCs were all right--the circ desk PCs, the ones in our personal offices are fine, just the public ones, which includes a PC lab of about 20 and 20 more in the library proper. 40 computers out of wack at a stroke. That is A Very Big Deal indeed.

IT came down, ran tests and declared that were are a victim of a virus worm. A big one that somehow manages to rewrite the task manager's scripts such that the PC is so damn busy running bogus instructions that it never even gets a chance to log on to an internet connection, even if one is readily available.  Every public computer was affected. In tech speak we are screwed, at least until they can run whatever patches they can find to repair the actual damage.

This is a major inconvenience for sure but not an Act of Total Destruction. Our books, after all, are fine. But our catalog, being electronic and thus only generally usable by a PC with an internet connection, is unavailable. But if a student comes to me at the desk and asks for a title, I can find it for him because those PCs work. In the meantime if a student needs to use a PC, we've been sending them to dedicated labs on the other floors. So far, so good.

The problem is being fixed: instead of trying to reverse engineer a virus patch (which they're not really equipped to do) IT took all of our nerfed PCs out and are slowly replacing them with brand new models. Ten got replaced yesterday, I'm hoping that they'll have finished with the work by Monday. Of course we've been asking for new PCs for going on two years now, and IT has been saying it's way too expensive and labor intensive to do that--but then pulling 40 PCs out of their department's collective ass isn't the sort of thing you can do in 24 hours. Orders that large from any major supplier can take 2-3 weeks to arrange (I know because I've had that job.)  And these are new machines in new boxes, so they didn't just fall off a truck. I find the coincidence interesting, but that's where I'll stop. 

That's all notable but not what interests me the most. What really got my attention was our students' reaction to the whole mess.  At first, we put a sign on the library door, a simple notice printed in Microsoft Word, saying the library computers are fritzed, please go to the other labs, etc. Nobody saw it. In my first ten minutes at the desk, I had to turn away twenty kids. Logical conclusion: we need a better sign. So we cleared off a much bigger white board and wrote the message in a big red marker, ALERT! LIBRARY COMPUERS ARE NOT WORKING and if anything, the number of students coming in to use them increased. Then we closed the door to the library but kids pulled it open and came in to work just the same. Finally, we put the message board in front of the doorway and then the kids noticed something was up. One girl pulled it out of the way, walked up to the desk and complained that the doorway was blocked. Another boy walked around the board and went past the desk on his way to use the PCs.

I understand 20-somethings. I was one myself, after all, even if that was sometimes last century. But my generation was drilled to look for signs in BIG RED LETTERS  that denoted something different about the terrain. And I grok that once they walk through those glass doors in the lobby habit takes over and to these kids it's just another day at school. Since many of our programs are geared toward business and public administration, it's interesting that they're not more on the ball or on the lookout for the strange and unusual--one of our big draws, for example is our degree in Emergency and Disaster Management. Habits can be dangerous when trying to analyze the unexpected and adapt to it.

Is there a lesson here? I don't think so. Just a long and wacky week in the edumacation business.

Problems with Workflows and Plans for 2009

Now that it's a new year/new semester, I'm back to playing catch-up with the world.  Namely, back to cataloging. 112 new volumes that are destined to sit upon the noble shelves of the Reserve section (required text for the most part) and the Education resource Room.  This will take days but at least it's not difficult work.

What is more difficult (or at least aggravating)  is navigating the guts of SirsiDynix Unicorn Workflows Java Client v. 3.21.2.1.  I've got the ILS installed on all but one of the staff workstations in the library and for the most part it's working nicely.  One thing that is really giving me the business is the configuration modules's use of override passwords.  The passwords are easy to set up--in fact we migrated all the previous password to the current setup.  It remembered everything that came over from the earlier install, so that's not the problem.  The problem (I know this is a roundabout explanation, but bear with me, we're almost there) is that every detail of the five main configuration flowcharts must absolutely agree with each other, or the ILS blocks the user's access to the module function.  In other words all the details must agree to get access to the stuff I and the staff had full access to before we migrated. 

The confusing part about this is that when creating or modifying a new User Access profile, it gives you the option of choosing or omitting any one of the wide array of tools and permissions that are part of the access tree. For example, I've got student workers able to perform only basic actions (create/modify user, check in/discharge, etc.) but now even those require password overrides.  Even the super user account I created for myself some time ago is subject to the overrides.  

Long story short (as if you haven't sat through enough already), I have to create a block of time to sit down, print out every configuration rule chart this application has, and figure out how to make everything agree.  It'll be ugly but the guys at Sirsi Clientcare insist that's how one goes about fixing it.  Yowza.

In the mean time, there are other things to plan for. The catalog need a deep reaming and that's the sort of thing that goes above and beyond mere semiannual weeding.  The RFID tags (using our single tagging station) have been integrated into our Reserve collection and that part of the grand scheme is working as expected.  But now we need to follow through.  We'll need to budget for additional circulation stations to start tagging the rest of the collection and a definite time-frame for this to happen.  45,000 books can be tagged at a rate of 10,000 per year in 4.5 years, so it's doable but we need to keep up with it.  That means talking to Bibliotecha, the company we bought the system from.  A lot of talking.

Another major project, which I'll need to report on to my boss by mid-March is the possibility of integrating our Full Text journals into the catalog. I can think of a number of ways to do  this (something like Serials Solutions' Article Linker comes to mind since I worked successfully with it in the past).  The mechanics need to be figured out of course, but the benefits to the students and faculty are pretty clear ("More stuff on tap! Yea!").  Then there's the actual labor involved, but since Serials Solutions would be doing the heavy lifting on it, that's less of a problem than it might sound.  Finally, there are the training issues for staff, students and faculty.

There's more to think of: preparing better and more frequent stat reports for the staff and admin folks, improving and implementing new quality control procedures, and improving our collective levels of customer service, to name three, but that's for later.

For now, back to cataloging.

Sarah Palin: Library Censor or Just Another Fascist?

It turns out that Sarah Palin may not be quite the advocate of library censorship many of us have been led to believe.  This bulletin from  FactCheck.org showed up in my mailbox the other day:

One false rumor accuses then-Mayor Palin of threatening to fire Wasilla’s librarian for refusing to ban books from the town library. Some versions of the rumor come complete with a list of the books that Palin allegedly attempted to ban. The story is false on several fronts: Palin never asked that books be banned; the librarian continued to serve in that position; no books were actually banned; and many of the books on the list that Palin supposedly wanted to censor weren't even in print at the time, proving that the list is a fabrication.

It’s true that Palin did raise the issue with Mary Ellen Emmons, Wasilla’s librarian, on at least two occasions. Emmons flatly stated her opposition both times. But, as the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman (Wasilla’s local paper) reported at the time, Palin asked general questions about what Emmons would say if Palin requested that a book be banned. According to Emmons, Palin "was asking me how I would deal with her saying a book can't be in the library." Emmons reported that Palin pressed the issue, asking whether Emmons' position would change if residents were picketing the library. Wasilla resident Anne Kilkenny, who was at the meeting, corroborates Emmons' story, telling the Chicago Tribune that "Sarah said to Mary Ellen, 'What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?' "

Palin characterized the exchange differently, initially volunteering the episode as an example of discussions with city employees about following her administration's agenda. Palin described her questions to Emmons as “rhetorical,” noting that her questions "were asked in the context of professionalism regarding the library policy that is in place in our city." Actually, true rhetorical questions have implied answers (e.g., “Who do you think you are?”), so Palin probably meant to describe her questions as hypothetical or theoretical. We can't read minds, so it is impossible for us to know whether or not Palin may actually have wanted to ban books from the library or whether she simply wanted to know how her new employees would respond to an instruction from their boss. It is worth noting that, in an update, the Frontiersman points out that no book was ever banned from the library’s shelves.

Moreover, although Palin fired Emmons as part of a "loyalty" purge, she rehired Emmons the next day, and Emmons remained at her job for two-and-a-half more years. Actually, Palin initially requested Emmons’ resignation in October 1996, four days before the public discussion of censorship. That was at the same time she requested that all four of Wasilla’s department heads resign. Palin described the requests as a loyalty test and allowed all four department heads to retain their positions. But on Jan. 30, 1997, three months after the censorship discussion, Palin informed Emmons and Wasilla’s police chief, Irv Stambaugh, that they would be fired. According to the Chicago Tribune, Palin did not list censorship as a reason for Emmons’ firing. Palin rehired Emmons the following day. Emmons continued to serve as librarian until August 1999, when the Chicago Tribune reports that she resigned.

So what about that list of books targeted for banning, which according to one widely e-mailed version was taken “from the official minutes of the Wasilla Library Board”? If it was, the library board should take up fortune telling. The list includes the first four Harry Potter books, none of which had been published at the time of the Palin-Emmons conversations. The first wasn't published until 1998. In fact, the list is a simple cut-and-paste job, snatched (complete with typos and the occasional incorrect title) from the Florida Institute of Technology library Web page, which presents the list as “Books banned at one time or another in the United States.”

So she never actually demanded that particular books be removed, banned, burned, or what-have-you. She merely floated the idea to see if her local librarian would freak out. (It'd be interesting to be able look in her head and see what she actually expected to happen.) Additionally, the head librarian continued to work for Palin  for quite a long time. Okay, fine.

But the thing about loyalty tests and such bug the living crap out of me. Haven't we had enough of that since 2000? Pretty much the only people still in public policy at the federal level are the crooks, sycophants, ideologues and incompetents. I haven't seen much to make me believe that a McCain-Palin administration would not be more of the same.

This Could Happen to You (Buwahahahaha)

I hasten to note that this probably won't happen to you specifically--unless you've been playing fast and loose with the lending policies of your library (and you haven't . . . have you?)--but it could.

Wisconsin Woman Arrested, Booked Over Library Fines

I think I speak for all librarians when I say, yes, I know the 30 day lending limit just is not enough for some busy people, the fines are minor (in the beginning anyway) and returning books to the library is rarely at the top of anyone's to-do list.  But--still speaking for librarians everywhere--I can also say, do you know how much money, time, energy and patience a flood of unreturned books costs? Any idea? How about thousands of dollars of materials and labor, hours of cataloging, and screwed up library budgets?  Not to mention the immense self control required to put up with the infantile whining of obnoxious patrons/students/researchers/etc, who insist that the fines are "wrong" (or "not theirs")?

My advice is simple and time-tested. Return the books on time. Pay your fines when they're small. (But you knew that.)  And, please come again.

Gun Toting Librarian

Just for the sheer heck of it (and to respond to the underrepresentation of liberals who enjoy guns in the general media), I'm putting up this picture of me at the West Side Rifle & Pistol Range behind the edit. Enjoy!

NY Public Library Sells Out for (Not So) Big Bucks

I'm the first to admit it: I am a big, fat, wallowing cynic and have been since I was about twelve years old.  So news items like the following headline from Alternet.org don't surprise me. They should--I would dearly love them to--but they just don't and that  is likely to say a lot more about me than it does about the unholy marriage between libraries' need for funds and the cash-heavy world of Big Business. That said, this is hitting me in a very unhappy spot this morning.

To wit, feast your ocular sensory organs upon this tidbit:

NY Public Library Trades Naming Rights to Greedy hedge Fund Billionaire for Big Bucks.

You may commence vomiting at any time.

"But wait a minute, you pretentious, hypocritical, lout," you say, "did you or did you not slobber all over Andrew Carnegie in your last post?" Well, yes, I did.  But I think I was justified in doing that, and here's why.  Carnegie amassed a fortune of about $1 billion, of which he left $300 million to fund public libraries all over the world.  In 2008  dollars those values would be worth something like  $20 billion and  $6 billion respectively.

Got that?  That's a $6 billion dollar endowment in today's dollars to build a world-wide system of public libraries.  Nothing like it had ever been done, neither the gift nor the project it funded.

According to the linked article NYPL sold the name of their main building in exchange for a donation of $100 million. That's it.  100 million stinking greenbacks that aren't worth  anything like what they were worth in 1914 and will continue to be worth less and less every year, considering the Federal Reserve Bank's current attitude towards inflation (i.e., if it keeps the country working a bit longer, it's worth it.) And that just to change the name on the main building.  If there is an exchange of something of genuine value here, I'm not seeing it.

Granted, $100 million buys a lot of library resources and even in the world of Richistan is not quite chump change, at least, not yet.  But it's not $6 billion, either. In those terms, in my not so humble opinion, they should have held out for a lot more.  If Stephen A. Schwarzman wanted to buy his way into history, then fine.  But he should have paid what the related goodwill (as accountants call it) was worth.  Had the call gone out for a $1 billion capital drive and had he written a check on the spot for the entire amount (or hell, even half the full amount) I could have lived with it.   I would still be pissed since the NYPL is the jewel in the crown of the city's public library system, but $1 billion (or $500 million) is real money and the gesture would have been genuine.

As the Yoruba say, "The world is the marketplace," and that's fine.  Public libraries are always short of funds and sometimes bend over backwards to encourage rich folks to jam crowbars in their wallets, and that's fine, too.  But this time did they have to settle for so little ?

Back on Track and On-line

SirsiDynix's hosted account servers are back on-line and we've had nothing but consistent access to our catalog and ILS all day. The explanatory e-mail that we received from their tech people said that IBM, seeing a weakness in BellSouth's service conduits, allowed their primary service system to fail to bring the secondary into play. That done--and the plan seems to have worked--they'll take a good long look at the server to see what happened.

Huzzah!

Chaos, Catalog Migrations, and Beer

Everything is is chaos.  If you own a house with a mortgage you may lose it if you're not careful.  The FDIC may not do much to preserve your bank account if push comes to shove. The financial elites are wrecking what's left of the economy, the ex-spooks are suggesting that the rabble can analyze intelligence every bit as well (or better than) the CIA, and there are firm plans for the U.S Air Force and Navy to bomb the living crap out of thousands of targets in Iran.  And, oh yes, all that jazz about eating locally is a pipe dream, although Suzi Steffen has put together a decent if small reading list on the subject to wade through.

Faced with all this mishegoss and woe, I did what any red-blooded patriotic American would do. I made beer.  More on that in a bit.

But first I made sure that SirsiDynix actually migrated the catalog properly. (It did.)  Then I did a check on whether the proxy server was tested on time (it was not). Worst of all, in the time I originally wrote the previous paragraph and the time I now resume writing, the proxy server situation has deteriorated to the point where beer news seems far more important to me as opposed to IP addresses, EZProxy configuration and authentication permissions and a lack of access to a number of electronic resources.

(I know, I know . . . nothing is more important to the library or its patrons then access to the necessary resources.  All true.  But the IT department is aware of the problem, I am aware of how to contribute to its solution and we're doing what we can as quickly as we can to get things back to normal.  In the meantime, I made beer.)

Architect Selected for Bush Library

The story is here.  I won't make any jokes about how much room they'll need to house both books, but I am wondering of the book about the pet goat will be part of the collection.  I'm pretty sure that Richard Clarke's book about what went on prior to 9/11 won't be, but that's the cynic in me talking.  Again.

Ah, well.  A new library is a new library I suppose.