PALNI staff use system monitoring software to monitor and automatically log whether our Ex Libris Aleph system is online and operational at 15-minute intervals throughout the day. If the PALNI system is down for any reason, an "on-call" member of the PALNI staff is automatically paged so that any problem can be resolved quickly.

We have completed a review of our system monitor system log file for the 2007 calendar year. It shows that we experienced a total of 8.5 hours of unplanned Aleph system downtime during 2007. In addition, we scheduled a total of 9.25 hours of planned downtime over the 12 months for Aleph Service Pack installations and for other routine planned system maintenance activities.

As the Aleph downtime table shows, staff kept the PALNI system online and operational for over 99.9% of the approximately 8600 scheduled hours of PALNI system operation during the 2007 calendar! That is a significant achievement for a complex system like PALNI's that is routinely kept online on virtually a 24 hrs x 7 days per week basis.

Following up on the July 2 posting on PALNI's OCLC ILL Borrowing and Lending statistics, here is some more information from Collette Mak, INCOLSA Director of Library Products, about Indiana's top OCLC ILL borrowers and lenders. As the chart shows, four PALNI libraries, Butler, DePauw, Indiana Wesleyan, and University of Indianapolis are among Indiana's top OCLC ILL lenders, while four PALNI libraries, Butler, DePauw, University of Indianapolis, and Wabash College, are on the list of top Indiana borrowers,

The above chart is for the July 2005 through March, 2006 time period.

Collette Mak, Director of Library Products for INCOLSA, has given us some informative statistics about PALNI's InterLibrary Loan borrowing and lending patterns over five months in late 2005 and early 2006.

In terms of ILL borrowing, the data shows that all PALNI libraries combined borrowed 33,390 items through OCLC ILL during the five month time period. Here is the summary of who PALNI libraries borrowed from overall.

For PALNI's ILL lending, the statistics show that PALNI libraries combined lent 21,712 items through OCLC during the five month time period. Here is the summary breakdown of who PALNI libraries lent material to.

On Thursday, May 4, 2006, some of the PALNI staff, armed with stopwatches, fanned out to PALNI sites in the area to test response time of the WebOpac.  Staff traveled to DePauw, Butler and UIndy to do the testing.  Three others tested response time on keyword searches from the PALNI offices. The testers used a sample script of 96 actual user searches pulled from web server log files and each person was assigned a different starting point to avoid caching issues.  The searches were conducted between 1:30 pm and 3:30 pm, when the system is most active.

 The tests did not reveal any major surprises.  They do confirm, however, that some PALNI libraries are experiencing real OPAC response time problems.  In addition, the results suggest that

1. Except for sorting, keyword search response times do not seem to be related in any direct way to the number of hits, 
   
2. Searching the PALNI union catalog is faster than searching any individual library catalog,
3. PC problems can contribute to significantly slower response times,
   
4. Keyword search response times can vary significantly from one library to another.

 Attached is a small chart that shows, for each library, the number of searches that retrieved more than 250 records and did not require sorting, the average search time, the median search time, and the number of searches that took more than 3 seconds.  Also attached is a spreadsheet of all of the search terms and the results of the searches.