The Bodleian Library’s search engine SOLO unexpectedly crashed on Friday 25th January, leaving students unable to search for books from 7am. Bodleian staff worked throughout the day to fix the error, and were finally able to restore SOLO to working order by 5.15pm.
The problem has been described as a highly unusual error that staff had never seen before, and could not have predicted.
Wolfram Horstmann, Associate Director for Digital Library Programmes and Information Technologies, said, “A programme that cleans outdated information from the system was faulty. The programme affected parts of the system, and the data consistency of SOLO and Aleph was endangered. In order to prevent further damage, a security procedure was invoked.
“Since the Bodleian operates one of the most comprehensive library systems worldwide, this procedure takes time, although the system was restored within less than twelve hours.”
It was the first major outage the Bodleian staff have experienced since changing to the new Integrated Library System in July 2011. Staff were able to restore the programmes successfully by using secure copies.
Notifications were placed on the website to inform students of the ongoing problems, and librarians were kept up to date so readers could be made aware of the situation. The library also updated their Twitter page to alert followers to the news, providing information about alternatives to the SOLO site.
A spokesperson from the Bodleian said, “We continue to work to prevent such an outage happening again. We are currently working with the University with an aim to providing greater investment in the Libraries’ IT infrastructure. We apologise for the inconvenience this caused our readers.”
Phoebe Braithwaite, a second-year English student, said, “I couldn’t believe that at such a crucial moment in the process of writing my essay, I was abandoned by the institution I looked to for my education. It’s all very well updating Twitter with alternatives, but how many students follow the Bod?”
Abdul-Rahman Jama, a third-year student studying Hebrew and Arabic at Balliol, agreed, stating, “It was distressing. Writing an essay became exponentially more difficult purely because you couldn’t track anything down. A first world problem of the highest calibre, but still.”
Many others felt similarly, with one student saying, “I understand that technical problems happen, and appreciate the efforts of all staff involved but they just didn’t do anything to let us know what was going on. The notice on the website was fine, but what about sending emails or updates? Nobody knew how long it was going to be down, which was really inconvenient.”
A third-year Classics student from Merton had a more positive approach, telling Cherwell, “SOLO’s crash was one of the better things that has happened to me this term. I was just about to do some reading for a tutorial I had in an hour’s time, but when I logged on to the library computer, it turned out SOLO was down. I briefly contemplated looking the books up in the card catalogue, but reckoned I wouldn’t have the time – so I just had to sit in the JCR, drink tea and read the papers.”
