[Libs-Or] OSLIS Lite

[Jennifer Maurer]

OSLIS is an information literacy website, www.oslis.org<http://www.oslis.org>, and the portal for K12 Oregon students and educators to access the statewide subscription databases. If your library does not promote OSLIS with patrons, feel free to disregard this email.
As of about mid-November, OSLIS was set up to redirect to OSLIS Lite if the original OSLIS went down. (See the email below for a refresher.) Unfortunately, the failover feature did not consistently work, and lately when OSLIS was down, some users were not automatically redirected to OSLIS Lite. That is unacceptable, so today we asked the vendor to take down OSLIS and point all OSLIS URLs to OSLIS Lite.

You’ll recall that OSLIS Lite is a separate webpage with links to the Gale databases, LearningExpress Library, and the three versions of Citation Maker. (See the attached PDF for a screenshot of what it looks like.) When you click on Gale PowerSearch, you will get a menu of all of the Gale databases available via the statewide contract. What OSLIS Lite does not offer is differentiated content (different versions for elementary and secondary students and educators), the information literacy lessons (Learn to Research section of OSLIS), the worksheets for Citation Maker, the OSLIST archive, and the My Stuff folder. Why not? Because all of those features or sections are tied to the code in OSLIS that is having problems.

Speaking of OSLIS code, two separate vendors have examined it and cannot identify what is causing the site to have sporadic downtime. Therefore, we have decided to rebuild OSLIS from scratch. That process will minimally take through April and possibly through the rest of this school year. In the meantime, OSLIS Lite will remain available, and you should be directed to it regardless of which OSLIS URL/s you have bookmarked. Naturally, I will let you know when we are ready to go live with the rebuilt OSLIS. (Our goal is not to redesign OSLIS; it is simply to build a stable version of the site.)

OSLIS Lite is a basic HTML page and is very stable. However, should you experience any access problems, please report them. Include the date and time that the problem occurred , the text of any error messages, screenshots if possible, and anything else that you think would help us identify or replicate the problem.

If you have questions, please ask.

Many thanks,
Jen

Jennifer Maurer
School Library Consultant
Oregon State Library
250 Winter Street NE
Salem, OR 97301
503.378.5011
jennifer.maurer at state.or.us

OSLIS || www.oslis.org
Learn to research. Research to learn.©

From: libs-or-bounces at listsmart.osl.state.or.us [mailto:libs-or-bounces at listsmart.osl.state.or.us] On Behalf Of Jennifer Maurer
Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2011 9:45 AM
To: libs-or List
Subject: [Libs-Or] OSLIS Update

If your library does not promote OSLIS with patrons, feel free to disregard this email. (OSLIS is an information literacy website, www.oslis.org<http://www.oslis.org>, and the portal for K12 Oregon students and educators to access the statewide subscription databases.)
As you may know, the Technology Development Consultant at the State Library and I created OSLIS Lite because there are problems with the original OSLIS that causes it to randomly lock up or not be accessible. The vendor we recently contracted with made several updates to the original OSLIS and then tested the updates using an artificial load. In other words, they created a situation that replicates OSLIS being accessed by multiple simultaneous users. With that testing, they cannot get OSLIS to fail. That means we need to put the original OSLIS back up to see if the issues have truly been resolved.

In order to minimize downtime, the vendor proposed that they put OSLIS Lite on a second server that will automatically become active should the original OSLIS site have problems. The vendor has also configured the system to provide additional logging to gather system information for them to analyze should the original OSLIS site have problems.

I understand that the solution is not ideal because potentially you could be teaching one version of OSLIS and then get the other. However, we don’t have a lot of choices. Someone suggested that we keep OSLIS Lite up until summer and then do any repair work and testing. That’s not ideal for at least two reasons. One, what if the original OSLIS is truly fixed? If it is, we want it back up as soon as possible. Two, what if OSLIS isn’t fixed and the work to fix it takes longer than two and a half months? Then we run out of summer and are in the same boat we are in now.

So, we have opted to allow the vendor to reactivate the original OSLIS and to direct traffic to OSLIS Lite if the original OSLIS has problems. This is scheduled to happen late in the evening this Friday, November 18th.

If you encounter any problems with the original OSLIS (when it’s back up) or OSLIS Lite, please let me know. The more specific you can be, the better.

Thanks again for your patience.

Jen

Jennifer Maurer
School Library Consultant
Oregon State Library
250 Winter Street NE
Salem, OR 97301
503.378.5011
jennifer.maurer at state.or.us<mailto:jennifer.maurer at state.or.us>

OSLIS || www.oslis.org
Learn to Research. Research to Learn.

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