[Dtb-talk] Status of BARD

[Gregory Kearney]

While your right that this is a purely technical issues in the immediate case, this does go to larger management issues. The national library I ran in Australia, while not as big nor complex as the NLS system employed the idea of replicated servers. So we had several servers in Australia and in South Africa and Canada that were replications of the origin server in our building. The ones in South Africa and Canada were two way replications so we could get their books as well.

End users worked only from one of the replica servers, usually the one in Perth. Should there be any kind of issue, power outage, network troubles and so on, we simply redirected our URL to one of the other replications in another location. This, albeit on a much more sophisticated scale is how companies like Google function.

When we upgraded the software we would always shut down the replication from the origin server in our building so that if we did something crazy and broke things, it did happen, the replicated servers did not get the bad configuration.

It would seem that this outage is, most likely, due to the fact that the NLS/Library of Congress has no replication of their servers. So when their network failed, and this appears to be a network issue not a server configuration one as it is impacting other Library of Congress services and not just BARD, they had no means to point to another location to continue, at a minimum consumer, level service.

So there is an underling management issue at play here. This has been reported prior to this event. A March 2015 report from the Government Accountability Office (http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/669367.pdf) reported that the library is "not effectively managing" its $119 million in IT investments for fiscal year 2014, and is struggling in key areas such as privacy controls.

This matter has now reached the media:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style-blog/wp/2015/09/04/library-of-congresss-computer-woes-also-disrupt-national-service-for-blind-and-disabled-users/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/copyright-offices-online-registration-hasnt-worked-for-almost-a-week/2015/09/03/b12781e2-5261-11e5-9812-92d5948a40f8_story.html

http://fcw.com/articles/2015/09/02/copyright-registration.aspx

http://fcw.com/articles/2015/03/31/gao-library-of-congress.aspx


Commonwealth Braille & Talking Book Cooperative
Greg Kearney, General Manager
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Email: gkearney at gmail.com




> On Sep 7, 2015, at 6:50 AM, David Andrews via Dtb-talk <dtb-talk at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> No, it has nothing to do with budget, just large technical problems.
> 
> Dave
> 
> At 11:56 AM 9/5/2015, you wrote:
>> Thank you, does this have anything to do with the budget? If so, How
>> can we make our voices heard on the importance of maintaining this
>> site. Peace, Cheryl
>> 
>> On 9/4/15, Andrews, David B (DEED) via Dtb-talk <dtb-talk at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>> > As some of you know, BARD, NLS's digital book download site has been down
>> > for several days.  Apparently the Library of Congress is having various
>> > communications problems. NLS has recently said that the site will be down
>> > for several more days, probably through Tuesday.
>> >
>> > Dave
> 
>        David Andrews and long white cane Harry.
> E-Mail:  dandrews at visi.com or david.andrews at nfbnet.org
> 
> 
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