I would like to apologize for any inconvenience caused by the unavailability of the Libraries’ website during the holiday closure.

The Libraries’ website, including our extensive menu of links to external databases and full-text journals, was unavailable intermittently during Temple’s holiday closure. Security software installed on our webserver registered recurrent attacks or other suspicious activity and shut down the server to protect data. Library staff on call brought the system back online during the University closure as they became aware of the problems, but subsequent apparent attacks prompted repeated shutdowns.

The webserver and its firewall were stabilized early Tuesday morning (1/2/07) and have been continuously available since then.

We have taken additional steps behind the scenes to prevent recurrence of such extensive outages which we all recognize as having impeded research activity by faculty and students working over the break. Further hardware and software modifications will continue during the spring so that we can continue to improve the reliability of access to the increasingly broad and indispensable array of online resources and services we now offer. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience this problem caused. We will do our best to ensure that it does not happen again.

Larry P. Alford,
Vice Provost for Libraries