We're Back Up...

Good morning!  We had the Library catalog back up and running a little before 8 this morning and things seem to be working fine.  Thanks for bearing with us while we took a few extra precautions during the storm.  It is much easier to restore the catalog when we have had the chance to do an orderly shutdown first.  Power outages don't usually afford us this opportunity, so it was good to have some advance notice that we would not be open in order to prepare.  As it turns out, we didn't need to shut down, but it seemed the best thing to do given the power outages of the last year and the storm predictions!

We have one remaining function of our catalog that will not be totally up and running until tomorrow.  We have some automated reports that run each morning beginning around 5 am that are ready for the staff when we come in.  These reports provide us information about such things as who has booked a DVD for that day or who has placed a request for us to purchase a book via our PDA process.   They also let us know who has placed holds on items on a particular day.  Because those reports couldn't run Monday morning or today, there may be information that we are missing related to requests.

These reports should run fully in the morning and we will be able to catch up then on anything we missed.  So we apologize for any delay in responding to requests you may have placed on Sunday, but we will get to those as soon as we can tomorrow.  (There could be no requests placed on Monday because the server was down.) 

Thanks for your continued patience!

Ann Knox
Instructional Resource Center

Library Catalog Down During Hurricane Sandy

With the notice this evening that the Richmond campus will be closed tomorrow, Oct. 29, we have decided to bring down the library servers that host the catalog in order to avoid any potential problems due to power outages that Sandy may decide to bring along in her wake!  As long as the campus has power, the Library website and databases can still be reached.

This outage will impact the Charlotte campus as well .  We will bring the servers back up and restore access to the catalog as soon as the Library reopens.  We are sorry for this inconvenience but our past experience with our many power outages this past year makes us think this is a good thing to do.

We'll post on Facebook and on this blog as soon as we are back up.

Ann

Scheduled server maintenance

We will be conducting the monthly full backup of our Library catalog this weekend.  That means our catalog will be offline from approximately 11:00 pm Saturday through 7:00 am Sunday.

Only the catalog will be affected by this ... our Library website, online databases and e-journals should still be accessible during this period.

Paula

Beautiful books on display

David Roberts was a Scottish painter who introduced the Holy Land to British viewers in the early-to-mid nineteenth century.

His meticulous drawings and watercolors of romantic landscapes and people in exotic costume fascinated the public, influencing Victorian taste and aesthetic sensibility and helping to shape the character of biblical narratives in popular imagination.

He travelled throughout Egypt, Nubia, Sinai, Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon in 1838-1840, creating hundreds of sketches from life.  Upon his return to Edinburgh, he worked with lithographer Louis Haghe and the Rev. George Croly to produce beautiful oversized volumes of his images and Croly’s text.  This work was published over a span of years, 1842-49.  The expensive process of printing and binding was made possible by selling subscriptions to 400 buyers in advance, of whom Queen Victoria was the first.

The Morton Library is privileged to own first editions of Volume One,  Jerusalem and Galilee (1842), and Volume Two,  The Jordan and Bethlehem (1843).  We plan to display these volumes one at a time over the coming year, turning to a new illustration every two weeks.  Look for it in the large flat display case near the Circulation Desk.

Paula