The mega-glitch that brought down the central computer system serving 24 north and northwest suburban libraries should be fixed with no major loss of data.
That’s the good news. The bad news is it will likely take another week before the system is back on-line and fully operational.
Richard Shurman, administrator of Cooperative Computer Services in Arlington Heights, said technicians confirmed Friday that the worst-case scenario of libraries unable to tell who has checked out what will not materialize.
But he wasn’t exactly cheery about the outcome.
“We still know this is going to leave us with a period of over two weeks of disruption of service,” he said.
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The problem occurred April 28 when technicians from Geac Computer Corp., which sold and maintains the system, tried to replace a hard drive. When the computer crashed, technicians found they could not access backup data because of a faulty tape drive.
A spokeswoman for Geac, which runs 850 library computers worldwide, called the incident “just one of those freak accidents.” In response to the incident, the company wrote a new program to give the libraries better tools to verify that backup data are not corrupted.
The cooperative tracks 3.5 million books, videos and CDs and the records of 700,000 patrons.