OBIS takes a nosedive and students suffer the weekend

The library's electronic catalogue system was down for days

To the frustration and dismay of the student population, the Oberlin Bibliographic Information System (OBIS) was off-line over much of the Labor day weekend.

The trouble began last Thursday morning at 5 a.m. when a system technician checked in for the day and found the system malfunctioning. According to Director of Libraries Ray English, there were major disk problems with the hard drive that stores the operating system for OBIS. These problems were so severe that the library required a new replacement hard drive flown in from California.

Despite a long delay posed by the Labor day weekend, OBIS was working properly by Sunday. "Although there are some minor problems they're not ones that users would experience," said English. "As far as students and faculty are concerned, the system is functioning normally."

"We don't expect any immediate problems. OBIS has been very reliable," English said. "But we should keep the Boy Scout motto in mind and 'Be Prepared.'"

OBIS's data banks catalog all of the collections of every campus library, the Oberlin College Archives, and the audiovisual department. It also allows the fast, computerized check-out of books.

Associate Director of Libraries Alan Boyd said, "This is the third time it's gone out." On the average, it took a two-day period to get everything working again. This was the longest recent down said Boyd. He attributed the delay to the holiday. "We had no control over the system."

English and Boyd stressed that OBIS only experienced a hardware problem, and that the OBIS software was running fine.

According to Boyd, English wants students to know that when OBIS goes down there are another alternatives. "We have a ready-made backup - OhioLINK," he said.

When OBIS was off-line, Thursday to Sunday, students who attempted to log on found a web page that instructed them to use OhioLINK instead. Thus far, English said he had not heard any complaints from either staff or students.

True to their nature, students had plenty to complain about. College senior and Assistant Reserve Librarian Althea Nicholson said, "It was horrible. We had to do everything by hand." She said students would look through the stacks to find books for their classes that were not there. "We had lines from African American Studies to the exit," Nicholson said.

Because OBIS was off-line, reserve librarians had no knowledge if books were returned on time or not. "We had to resort to threatening people," Nicholson said.

"Some students did take advantage of the fact that we were checking out things manually," English said. "They kept the readings longer than the usual three-hour check-out period. There was also some theft of photocopied articles, but not more than we experience regularly."

The students, however, appreciated the extra time they could use to study the reserve materials. "It was a field day for students," said college senior Melissa Hemmings.

As for those who took the articles, English was strict. "Any students we catch doing that will face judicial proceedings," he said.

OBIS was purchased four years ago on a time payment plan. "We have two years left to pay for it," Boyd said. Boyd said after the College pays for the technology they plan to replace it. English said, "We've had the same system since 1994. It's been very reliable."

When the time comes, Boyd said they plan to replace the current system with one that possibly has mirror disks. When one disk would break down, its mirror disk would take charge of the work, thereby not interrupting service.