Electronic Outages: What Broke, Who Broke It, and How to Track It

Abstract

Notes on Operations

Fighting an Uphill Battle: Troubleshooting Assessment Practices in Academic Libraries

“…At the conclusion of the study, Wright opined that "no one institution can systematically rid itself of the kinds of errors seen repeatedly, across platforms, vendors and content delivery services." 3 Wright continued, "Improving our ability to describe errors, to capture examples of them and the attempts made to fix them, is the first part of what is sure to be an arduous but ultimately worthwhile process." 4 Similarly, Goldfinger and Hemhauser used the resulting data from their study of troubleshooting tickets to propose projects at the University of Maryland, College Park, intended to mitigate future outages and access issues for users.…”

“…3 Wright continued, "Improving our ability to describe errors, to capture examples of them and the attempts made to fix them, is the first part of what is sure to be an arduous but ultimately worthwhile process." 4 Similarly, Goldfinger and Hemhauser used the resulting data from their study of troubleshooting tickets to propose projects at the University of Maryland, College Park, intended to mitigate future outages and access issues for users. These proposals include updating a local Frequently Asked Questions service page, wherein users could be directed to a "report a problem" link for certain types of outages, and make future changes if a more in-depth analysis revealed additional frequently occurring problems that could be alleviated by providing users with more information.…”

“…31 Wright indicated that detecting patterns within troubleshooting data can be difficult, and "attributing outages to the correct source of the problem swiftly becomes a point of contention." 32 Brett, Goldfinger and Hemhauser and Wright all indicated difficulty in categorizing tickets to determine patterns. 33 In fact, Brett, who set out to compare rates of access outages between two institutions, noted that it is necessary to have a standardized vocabulary of outage types to categorize each ticket instance, such as was developed by Goldfinger and Hemhauser, to enable vendors to address them on wide scale.…”

A Controlled Vocabulary for an Electronic Resources Problem Reporting System: Creation, Implementation and Assessment

“…Wright discusses revising workflows following the development and utilization of a ticketing system at the University of Michigan. 9 Another example of a next step is using a controlled vocabulary within a ticketing system to identify types of problems received, and using the vocabulary to make process changes for trouble-shooting. Goldfinger and Hemhauser described the process used at the University of Maryland, College Park to code trouble tickets to develop a vocabulary that was then used to provide data to aid in answering four questions: who reported problems, how well staff solved problems, to identify the most frequent types of problems, and to determine whether problems could be prevented through proactive work.…”