Exploring the Consistent behavior of Information Services

Laboratory on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing, Department of Archive, Library and Museum Sciences, Faculty of Information Science and Informatics, Ionian University, 72 Ioannou Theotoki Str., Corfu 49100, Greece

^a Corresponding author: sarantos@ionio.gr

Abstract

Computer services are normally assumed to work well all the time. This usually happens for crucial services like bank electronic services, but not necessarily so for others, that there is no commercial interest in their operation. In this work we examined the operation and the errors of information services and tried to find clues that will help predicting the consistency of the behavior and the quality of the harvesting, which is harder because of the transient conditions and the many services and the huge amount of harvested information. We found many unexpected situations. The services that always successfully satisfy a request may in fact return part of it. A significant part of the OAI services have ceased working while many other serves occasionally fail to respond. Some services fail in the same way each time, and we pronounce them dead, as we do not see a way to overcome that. Others also always, or sometimes fail, but not in the same way, and we hope that their behavior is affected by temporary factors, that may improve later on. We categorized the services into classes, to study their behavior in more detail.