Technical problems: very slow response times, “white screen of death” etc. The project group had a phone conference with Serials Solutions and they have confirmed that these problems are not normal and that they have their techies on to it to sort it out.
Subjects and database groupings: Revised subject and database lists are at: K:\projects\Federated_Searching_25\IntegrationProject\Subjectsanddatabases.doc
An update: Serials Solutions have discovered a small error in the javascript of our implementation which was leading to the "white screen of death". This should be improving some of the speed issues as well. Ser Sol are also adding additional servers to handle growing 360 Search traffic. This upgrade should improve our search speed, effective in the next day or so.
Two other aspects are affecting the speed of 360 Search:
1) EZProxy. EZProxy is adding to the search slowness by approx 20 secs or so. If you bypass EZProxy there should be a small improvement in speed. Library IT are checking our EZProxy configuration with Chris Zagar of Useful Utilities (who supply the EZProxy product). However, this is a small issue compared to 2)…
2) CSA databases. These appear to be, by far and away, the major cause of our slow searches. CSA are experiencing problems with their Z39.50 server which are causing federated searches sent to their server to be very slow, or to time out. When a search is issued to any CSA resource (or of course when "select all" is chosen), the searches will take a long time while they wait for either a response from CSA or for our search to eventually time out. Serials Solutions are sending weekly reports to CSA to keep them appraised of this issue, and CSA assure Serials Solutions that they are actively working to resolve this.
Moral of the story for the time being: if you deselect any CSA databases, you should see a major improvement with 360 Search in terms of search speed.
We will be having discussions as to how to pursue the CSA problems, which may be in the general context of other problems experienced with CSA this year.
The list of comments about subject groupings and databases for inclusion is at: K:\projects\Federated_Searching_25\IntegrationProject\Subjectsanddatabases.doc
Feel free to add any comments.