the black box of computer trouble paired with the bright light of radical trust

It’s easy to morning-after quarterback big computer disasters, but eleven days seems awfully long for an OPAC outage that was caused by a disk drive failure. When my ISP has a disk drive failure, they’re back up in an hour or two and restoring the data in the background over the rest of the day. It would have been really interesting to have been able to read a library blog about this outage and get updates on how the restoration was going, wouldn’t it? Instead we can peek at the Google cache to see what the library web site looked like, and see how it looks now. That sort of potential transparency is scary, but ultimately builds patron/customer/funder confidence, and helps with messes like this one. Michael Stephens has been discussing Darlene Fichter’s idea of radical trust, or put more simply “trusting the community.” and I think it’s something we’ll all be hearing more about, if not actually talking about. Trust me.