Officials of two dozen north and northwest suburban libraries are hopeful that technicians can save a crippled computer system, which for more than a week has left librarians unable to call up information about books, checked-out materials and library patrons.
“I can impart some grounds for optimism, though nothing is conclusive yet,” Richard Shurman, administrator of Arlington Heights-based Cooperative Computer Services, wrote Wednesday in a memo to the consortium of libraries that has had its central computer down since April 28.
But it will take at least two days for technicians, including data-recovery specialists brought in from Minneapolis, to know whether their plan to save the system will work.
Even if the problems are resolved, library officials said they expect the episode to lead libraries to re-evaluate whether to remain grouped together.
On April 28, a routine bit of preventive maintenance went wrong and shut down the system. The system keeps track of 3.5 million books, videos and compact discs as well as the records of 700,000 patrons of the libraries, including those in Barrington, Des Plaines, Glencoe, Libertyville, Park Ridge, Wheeling, Winnetka and Wilmette.
Even if the technicians can restore the data, the shutdown will cost untold hours of recovery work for library staffers and inconvenience to users, who have been unable to tap computer keys to check the availability of books.
“The reference staff is swamped,” said Eileen Kloberdanz, adult services coordinator of Cook Memorial Public Library in Libertyville. “You have to go to the shelves constantly and work with every patron. We have to look up everything ourselves.”
In a worst-case scenario, which now appears less likely, library directors feared they would have no way of knowing the status of hundreds of thousands of checked-out items, including pricey CDs and tapes.
The concern has been that the identities and check-out dates of several weeks’ worth of business before the crash would be lost and that fines would disappear, putting library patrons essentially on the honor system for the lost weeks.
“It’s really the terror of the unknown, being in limbo, not knowing if it’s going to be all over tomorrow or if it would mean rebuilding,” said Sandra Norlin, administrator of the Des Plaines Public Library.
Rebuilding the database would be an enormous task, requiring the re-entry of patron names, addresses, telephone numbers, reserve requests and more.
Cooperative Computer Services was created in 1975 to provide computer support to libraries. The benefit of such consortiums is that libraries share technology costs and offer patrons a powerful shared database to order materials not at the local library.
The downside, now vividly apparent, is that libraries also share the fate if a problem occurs in the central computer system.
“I’m expecting residual backlash of extreme displeasure no matter how this thing works out,” Shurman said.
The problem reportedly began with an error signal issued by a computer disc drive in the cooperative’s Arlington Heights office. The Canadian vendor that maintains the system sent workers to replace the equipment.
But data failed to copy from the old to the new drive, and both were damaged and rendered inoperable.
When technicians tried to use backup data, they discovered the backup data was useless. It’s possible that the library system had been going through the motions of backing up the data for years but was only producing gibberish.
More Top Picks Best Instant Read Thermometers
Some library systems, such as the Chicago Public Library, operate “mirror” databases, which duplicate all data simultaneously. But it is an expensive method not used by the cooperative.
Library staffs have tried to cope by teaching patrons to search the Internet or CD-ROMs to find whether a library owns a book. But those methods cannot indicate whether a book is in stock. That requires a trip to the library shelves.
At Winnetka-Northfield Public Library in Winnetka, problems were lessened because the library kept its old-fashioned card catalog.
“We once talked about getting rid of it, but felt our patrons still were using the card catalog,” said Donna Sundstrom, the library’s director. “Many of them are uncomfortable using the computer.”