You may have noticed that it can take a while to connect to the Factiva database. Searches, once you have connected to the database, are reasonably fast, but the actual initial connection can be slow.

I’ve been talking to the Proquest Technical Support people about this, and sent them the url to have a look at Camtasia videos that I made which showed how long it takes to connect. We suspected that the slowness of connection was caused by the number of javascripts that have to be downloaded to create the web page, which on this side of the world can make a big difference to how fast (or slowly) the page loads. The videos, and the results of a trace route command that I ran for them, seem to have convinced them that we are correct, and they have now “logged a suggestion to have the structure re-worked to better allow for that connection”. They did admit that this might be a long process, so we may have to wait a while before we see any improvement.

However, it does demonstrate that it is worth following up with suppliers to let them know that they need to consider connections to this part of the world, where internet connections are more complex and can slow down connections if the web page design does not take this into account. The Camtasia videos are a particularly effective way of convincing the suppliers of what is actually happening, particularly when they try to put the blame on ezproxy. So do contact Library IT if you think a particular database is continually unreasonably slow, and we will try to follow this up with the supplier.

Catherine Jane