Last Friday the online Bodleian search engine SOLO crashed leaving hundreds ofstudents without the ability to find their books.
The Bodleian search engine, “Search Oxford Libraries Online” (SOLO), temporarily stopped working last Friday. The search engine allows users to find which Bodleianor college libraries hold certain books.
Oana Romocea, Communications Manager for Bodleian Libraries, commented, “We are very sorry for the outage of the libraries online catalogue. The downtime was the result of an external failure with the host who provide additional search functionality for SOLO.”
She continued, “We are currently working with our external supplier to provide amore reliable product. We apologize for any inconvenience the SOLO downtime caused to our users and we will try to do everything within our control to prevent thishappening again in future.”
Maddy Ward, a theologian finalist, told Cherwell, “the prospect of not being able to find my books for a few hours initially filled me with dread. Until I realised that the Bod has all books anyway, so I just went there and the crisis was averted.”
Ben Harris, a PPEist at St Johns, was equally affected saying, “I was riding SOLO, but then it crashed. I can’t believe our system has sunk SOLO.”
Although the crash did affect many students many more were less distraught. An anonymous third year Biochemist said, “I hadn’t realised SOLO crashed until you asked me about it.”
The search engine has been known to crash before, including the infamous “Black Friday”, 25th February 2011, in which it crashed for literally minutes. It is yet to be known whether last Friday’s crash will also go down in history.
Luckily the crash was fixed within hours,.
