library upgrade week


The Ottawa Public Library‘s electronic catalogue is apparently being upgraded, and as a result is unavailable for three freaking days. What the hell?

They helpfully note:

You will be able to browse the shelves and renew and check out material. The bookdrop will be accessible as usual.

Items will not become due during the week of June 19 – June 25. The Library encourages you to return your Library material later that week.

Browse the shelves? There’s two dozen library branches! What kind of upgrade requires 72 hours to complete?

(I’m sort of hoping that after this the “find this book at my library” Amazon bookmarklet will work; the iPac version of that bookmarklet was for a different version of iPac than the Ottawa library was using.)


3 responses to “library upgrade week”

  1. When our college upgraded their library’s database, the library was closed for an entire week. It wasn’t even ready to reopen on the date scheduled, because of technical difficulties. So this could be a case of “library software sucks” (which it does, but you’d think that a major city could hire skilled technicians to get it running faster). :-p

  2. Wow I did not know about that.

    I had adapted a FireFox Search Plugin from another library that uses the same system.

    My Library uses sirsi (WebCat) it didn’t work at first because of some sessions issues but I adjusted the URL to be the same as my search plugin and all is good now.

    Thanks and 72 hours, havent they ever heard of a dev server?