Unplanned ACORN Index Rebuild Accomplished

Last week a couple of indexing anomalies were identified in ACORN. The problems caused incorrect results when searching was qualified by 856 or 773 fields. Searching without field qualifiers was working correctly and the Library-specific indexes were also unaffected.

This problem was reported to SIRSI on Thursday February 18 and was resolved by the following Saturday afternoon. SIRSI's repsonse to this problem was extremely prompt and effective.

Top management at SIRSI determined quickly that the problem occurred as a result of having changed a system parameter related to the number of occurrences of a particular tag that could be indexed in a single record. SIRSI had increased this limit for us last fall. BRS was called in to consult on the problem, and the resulting solution was to rebuild the union keyword index.

Although any problem with our indexes is potentially serious, the effects of this one were fortunately relatively minor. We are glad to have identified and resolved this problem before it became serious enough to be noticed and reported by library users.

An unexpected side benefit of this rebuild was that it allowed us and SIRSI to test out the non-destructive index rebuilds which will be a big advantage in the future, since we can keep all our keyword indexes in place and functioning while new ones are completed.