Montgomery County Public Libraries will pay $75,000 for a fix it hopes will put an end to widespread system outages that left many key services unavailable to patrons.
Last week, patrons weren’t able to search the system’s online catalog, renew materials by telephone, place holds or pay fines and fees.
For the second time in five months, the department’s Integrated Library System had gone down.
Carol Legarreta, the department’s public services administrator, said aging computer server equipment was to blame for the outage, which means libraries will not charge overdue notices for items due from May 13-15.
To fix the problem, the department asked its vendor to do an emergency migration of the computer system that manages its materials and customer accounts from the servers to the “cloud,” a hosted site on the Internet.
The department works with library software company SirsiDynix.
On Monday, the system was back up and running.
“Customers can expect greater stability in our catalog and account services, built-in redundancy, fewer interruptions in services,” according to a notice from the department posted on its website.
“We are no longer dependent upon aging equipment,” the notice read. “This migration was necessary because of equipment failure beginning last December, and we have been working to implement this migration since January.”
Legarreta said the migration to the cloud will cost the department an additional $75,000 a year for its Integrated Library System.
But replacing the aging servers with the cloud-based system will mean savings of $294,000 over the next seven years, Legarreta said, which is roughly $42,000 in savings per year.
