I have re-learned something today: technology never works in a live setting quite the same way it works in a test setting. Also, if anything can go wrong in front of a group of twenty collegues, it will.
Today (actually yesterday, as I am typing this well past midnight), my library was to go “live” with our new SFX service, or at least as “live” as we could so that the Research and Instruction division could get prepared for teaching it to our students and faculty before the semester begins next week. I have been working with a team of librarians representing all areas of the library as well as our systems administrator to get this service set up. All of us have been working hard this summer on this project, but since I am responsible for our electronic resources, I did most of the work with the knowledge base and configurations. That being said, it was incredibly frustrating that when we finally were able to share this product with the rest of the library, nothing worked the way it was supposed to. Arg.
Lesson learned — hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst.
we had the same thing happen at our library. now, our systems department is keeping quite about when or if it will ever work. sigh.
Oh, that’s bad! Most of the problems I ran into last week were not too difficult to fix. SFX is an odd blend of simple and complicated, but it is complex enough to be molded into whatever you might want it to be. The only problem with that is you have to really know what you’re doing.