News Article:

Last week, staff implemented some minor changes to the PALNI OPAC web pages to improve our ability to collect keyword search response time data on a 'library-by-library' basis. In looking at our on-going OPAC performance problems, our perception has been that there are significant differences in keyword search performance between PALNI campuses. With the data we can now collect, we hope to confirm that our general perception has been accurate accurate, and, if so, to collect some statistics that will show the performance differences to the Ex Libris technical support team.

We have generated our first OPAC performance report from this data, for the seven day time period from August 15 through August 21. The following chart summarizes keyword search performance for the PALNI OPAC over this time period for each PALNI library.

KW Search Performance for 8/18/06 through 8/24/06

The red line at the 3 second level marks the average level of keyword search performance that our contract with Ex Libris specifies. Unfortunately, for the past week, we were not able to collect data for Ancilla College, AMBS, or Huntington, but response time statistics are provided for all of our other libraries. Data for these three libraries is now being collected as well, and will be included in next week's reports.

Overall, average keyword search response times on some campuses are two to three times slower than on other campuses, and at least half of our campuses had average response times that were above the 3 second threshold. Please note that these statistics are based on response time data collected on PALNI's web server. As such, they do not include any delays caused by slowness of your campus LAN or Internet connections, any additional time to retrieve any images or style sheets that are included in your OPAC web pages, or delays caused by a slow web browser or PC. As a practical matter, actual OPAC performance on most campuses is likely to be about 1/2 to 1 second slower than these statistics show.

More complete data, including the number of keyword searches recorded during the week for each library, can be found in the attached 'pdf' document.