Electronic Outages: What Broke, Who Broke It, and How to Track It

Abstract

As electronic books and electronic journals have become more prevalent, so too do the number of electronic resources outages related to those resources. This paper, distilled from a presentation delivered at the 2015 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting, describes the implementation of a new tracking system for electronic resources outages at the University of Michigan (UM). It elaborates on the decisions that went into building the system and the insights gleaned from analyzing a year’s worth of outages. It is hoped that such data might better inform decisions related to electronic resources at UM, and that its collection might inspire similar data-driving tracking elsewhere.