Dead time

Our system is down.

The IT folks have been running regular system upgrades on Sundays for the past couple of weeks, during which both the public catalog and our "back-end" functions are unavailable. Although previously they've been finishing the upgrades well before we open at noon, this Sunday I guess things didn't quite go as planned, and thus far we have been dead in the water for about an hour and a half, with no clear indication of when the system will be restored.

Fortunately we have backup procedures for checking out books by hand when the Circulation module goes down (a more frequent occurrence in the days when the system was new), but our patrons--who depend on the OPAC to find the materials they need in the stacks--are just plain screwed right now, although I have been encouraging people to go upstairs and try their hand at the old card catalog on the third floor.

No takers yet on that decidedly low-tech approach, however, even though the catalog is good for materials as late as the early to mid 1990's. How quickly we lose our nerve to do things "the old-fashioned way"!