Comments on: Why transparency is important (or, how to lose your customers)

By: Tatiana B. Miller

Tatiana B. Miller — Tue, 08 May 2007 17:03:12 +0000

I’ve been struggling to implement our A-to-Z list since last summer. One of the major questions I have is related to our backup. EBSCO customer support told me that by downloading our collection on a regular basis, I am creating our backup copies. However, I am not completely convinced. The proxy settings in the download list do not match the settings in the Collection Editor, and EBSCO could not answer my simple question “why is that?” I am also not convinced by them that all my notes are somehow miraculously saved in the download excel sheet, since I do not see any columns where they appear. I wonder if anybody had used those downloads as the backups, and if they really store all the information you have in your Administrator module. If you know of any listserv(s) where I can post that question, please let me know.

Thanks,

Tatiana

By: Paul R. Pival

Paul R. Pival — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 04:31:51 +0000

Hey Meredith, after having a conversation with David Free I think I figured out our problem! It seems the EBSCO feed doesn't do anything until a day passes and the search is run within the database, which is counter to every other RSS feed I've plugged in to my aggregator. I guess I expect to see something right away to verify that it's working!!! Anyhoo, go ahead and leave an EBSCO feed in your aggregator for a couple of days and see if it doesn't mysteriously spring to life...

By: DannyD

DannyD — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 11:29:42 +0000

Things like these are why you (or at least the provider of the service!) should always use some kind of monitoring service for anything you consider important. That way they will know right away when something goes down the drain.

I had a site stop working for me last summer and didn’t know about it until almost a day later. A total disaster… After that I started using a site monitoring service called Pingdom. Has saved my bacon on two occasions since then. (I know, I really should switch to a more reliable host as well…)

By: Sarah Houghton (LiB)

Sarah Houghton (LiB) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:43:02 +0000

I’m going to come across like a Gale groupie here, but when our Gale databases go down, even for fifteen minutes, we get immediate e-mails from tech support telling us what’s going on (including the cause and estimated re-up time), e-mails letting us know about the progress if it’s an extended outage, and e-mails letting us know when access is restored. This is something I greatly appreciate as the tech manager for our library, and counts as a checkmark in Gale’s favor for future database purchasing decisions.

By: JD Kotula

JD Kotula — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 20:36:06 +0000

I don’t have an answer to your question, but if you’re ever stuck not knowing what database a periodical is indexed in, try Ullrich’s (in paper or online). That’s one of its main purposes.

By: Meredith Farkas

Meredith Farkas — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 14:21:54 +0000

lol! I’m also glad it’s not just me who is noticing this problem. I’ve also seen a few people complaining about the EBSCO page loading weirdness on the EZ Proxy listserv. Of course, no one has gotten a satisfactory answer as far as I know. Sigh…

By: scrappylibrarian

scrappylibrarian — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 23:54:14 +0000

arg – i meant to quote a section of your post above, to explain what I was referring to:

“sometimes I would click on an article link it wouldn’t go anywhere (the same page would just reload).”

By: scrappylibrarian

scrappylibrarian — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 23:53:04 +0000

thank you. thank you. thank you and bless your soul. We have felt crazy and cursed in our library, and have also been made to feel that it must be on our end (ie filter, firewall, or bandwidth). We updated all the ips and url changes on our side (and seriously – they send me enough emails, they could have sent me that email too instead of it being after the fact). Our tech services guy Brad has been very nice and patient and somewhat persistent – and actually admitted he just didn’t know in the end. The problem is just so durn intermittent its hard to pin down what is happening.

By: dave free

dave free — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 13:26:53 +0000

I haven’t played around with the EBSCO feeds yet, but have noticed a definite upswing in database problems in the past few months. In fact there was one yesterday. Luckily we get all of our EBSCO dbs through a state-wide consortium so we don’t have to deal with them directly with EBSCO customer supprt, which doesn’t sound too fun!

By: Christina Pikas

Christina Pikas — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 02:01:15 +0000

Thank you for venting — you are SO right… I’ve been complaining about the way they’ve done some of the upgrades this summer lots of places… not to mention the way they mounted the Inspec Archive (ARGH!). I’ve been getting these errors, too, but not with A to Z. I was just having such a crazy week I didn’t stop to figure out what was going on. I also assume that no one will tell me… they only tell the office where the check comes from which is an hour away. Now I’ll go back and grab that post I’ve had in draft and get it posted!