Disruptions to Library Portal Access

As some of you will realise there have been a series of service disruptions affecting the Library Portal over the past week.

These disruptions were caused by the instigation of a measure designed to improve the reliability and performance of the Library Portal.  The core of this was a process to shut down and restart the service at 12.00am each day.  It seems that the service was shutting down properly but not re-starting as expected.

We have received advice from the vendor which provides the Library Portal product and we are confident that the process is now functioning smoothly.

The Library is very conscious of the heavy demand placed on the Portal service and that these disruptions pose a significant problem to customers needing to access resources.  As a result of these service disruptions we are reviewing the way in which we monitor the availability of this service and the measures we take to ensure ongoing access to the Portal both on and off campus.