Springshare Support Blog

We waited until today to post the explanation behind yesterday’s LibGuides connectivity issue because we wanted to make sure that the fixes we deployed took care of the issue.

Here’s what happened: a couple of weeks ago our hosting facility had a big infrastructure upgrade – new routers, switches, the whole nine yards. But yesterday something went wrong with the shiny new stuff which caused one of our critical servers to be overloaded with access requests. Pings and connections were failing or being delayed, and  those delayed requests would then hit the servers all at once. We designed our servers to handle large loads and handle spikes in usage, but when you get a rare “super-spike” things slow down. A lot.

“Why don’t you just add more servers and hot-swap them?”, you may say. Well, adding more servers instantly in the case of LibGuides is not so simple: for some critical servers (like the one that we had problems with yesterday) any institution with the custom domain mapping option (most of our libraries have it) would have to update their local DNS records to point to new servers and it takes time (hours, sometimes even days) to propagate the changes to all DNS servers around the world.

In any case, we worked with our hosting provider to alleviate the networking issue and also made some changes to our server cluster so that it can handle way more traffic – about 10x more, to alleviate negative effects from any other potential super-spikes.

Here are a couple of important takeaways:

• Server issues happen – internet connectivity is complex beast – and unfortunately there are no guarantees that our infrastructure won’t have other issues unrelated to this problem. You can be sure of this, though – we monitor our infrastructure round-the-clock so we are the first to know whenever there are any issues. And whenever there are issues we spring to action immediately to remedy the situation asap.
• Whenever you have issues accessing LibGuides please check our Twitter webpage first to see if there’s a known issue (http://twitter.com/springshare). When we get thousands of support requests in a span of a couple of hours—literally, no joke—it is impossible to answer all of them quickly. If it’s a known issue our support team is already working on it and will fix it faster if they don’t also need to respond individually to thousands of emails.

  If you see an issue posted on Twitter, we are working on it and will post regular updates as well as “all clear”.

  If you are still having issues after things are back to normal (or no issues are mentioned on Twitter) you should send your support request and we will take a look at it asap – as we always do.

Again, we apologize for the problems accessing your trusty LibGuides yesterday. It was a networking black-swan type event (and just to reiterate—it was in no way connected to the attack on GoDaddy – please see this post). Remember, we are always doing everything we can to prevent these problems from happening in the first place.

It is worth noting that even counting yesterday’s issues, our uptime has been in the 99.99% range since we started LibGuides in 2007 – meaning it’s been down for only a handful of hours in the past 5 years.

Thank you, and onwards and upwards. Now we need to sign up 10x more libraries, because there’s a lot of room to grow in our infrastructure.

Best,
-Slaven & the Springshare team

Five years ago, George Bush was president, the Writers Guild of America went on strike, Steve Jobs announced the first generation iPhone, and a library-loving company called Springshare came into being. What a long way we’ve all come since then! As you can tell, we’re feeling a little nostalgic on this, the 5-year anniversary of the first LibGuide. Sadly, that guide has since been retired, but like all nostalgic people, we enjoy looking at snapshots through the years – and we thought you might too!

Here’s the first iteration of the LibGuides home page – thanks to Michael Stephens for sharing this image!

The admin page, circa 2008 – thanks to Kelly Smith at Eastern Kentucky University for this one!

And we saved the best for last – an old 404 message, shared by Elizabeth Brixton. Just so you know, it’s really Slaven’s fault.

We’ve come a long way in 5 years – from one guide to almost 250,000 (whoa!), and from a handful of librarians to over 44,000 (double-whoa!). Many thanks to all of you for being part of the Springy community – you guys never cease to amaze, educate, and delight us. And wow, time really does fly when you’re having fun!

By now, most of you know about our Best Of site. It houses a collection of guides considered “Best” for one reason or another – best page layout, best collection of resources, best use of images… you get the idea.

The best part of Best Of? We’ve already contacted the original guide authors and asked them if they’re willing to share their awesome content, so you’re free to copy any featured guide into your own site and reuse / remix it to your hearts content!

This week, we’ve added a new group of awesome guides to Health & Wellness Resources. These guides were compiled by the experts at Eugene Public Library and Berkeley Public Library, & showcase resources that cover everything from Fitness & Exercise to Nutrition, and from Alternative & Complimentary Medicine to Men’s & Women’s Health. Check them out – they’re sure to put a spring in your step!

We’re always looking for new guides to feature in Best Of. If you’ve created or know of a guide that makes you go “Whoa, that’s awesome!”, let us know!

Here at Springshare, we really do love librarians – so we whipped up a little Valentine’s gift for all our libraries. Check out these new-and-awesome features, and let us know – will you be our Valentine?

• Enhanced Content in Books from the Catalog box*
  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could enter an ISBN and automatically retrieve information for any book? Now you can! Just enter an ISBN, and we’ll automatically pull in the item’s title, author, and cover art.
  CampusGuides Mega Bonus: Our CampusGuides clients can also pull book descriptions, bestseller lists, Subject Categories, Publisher information, and other enhanced content from Bowker – for free, to be used in your guides! 
• Translate Public Screens
  LibGuides en Espanol? Francais? Italiano? Libraries can now customize the hard-coded text on public screens in their local language. If your local language is English, you can also customize the text to meet your needs. For example, change the search box drop-down to read “This Site” instead of “All Guides”. To customize your language file, email support@springshare.com to get started!
• New “Edit Box” menu
  You’ll love the consolidated menu in the “edit box” area. We combined all box edit functions into one screen. Just click “edit box”, and you’ll be able to change the box title, type, colors, etc. Even better, you can grab each box’s direct link, as well as an API call for any box, all in the same screen!
• Add Longer Descriptions to the Links & Lists box
  We get it. 500 characters for description in the Links & Lists box wasn’t enough, so we’ve upped the length of the description field to 1,000 characters.
• Using the Serials Solutions A-Z Import Tool?
  Now you can update the 3-letter Serials Solutions ID for any previously imported link! Just head to your A-Z import guide and select “edit link”. You’ll see a new tab for “Serials Solutions” – click it to change the Serials Solutions Database Identifier.
• CampusGuides clients can now upload files up to 10MB in size
  CampusGuides folks – we’ve doubled your file upload size from 5MB to 10MB.
• Update to AddThis Button
  The email function in the AddThis button on public screens is back up and working properly!
• Guide Status Notification on all screens
  Seriously – sometimes it’s all about the little things. We’ve added a note to the edit guide screen that lets you know the guide’s current status – Unpublished, Published, or Private.

* Please remember – free use of Syndetics cover art and Bowker content is limited to use within LibGuides and CampusGuides