False alarm for overdue books
Computer glitch sends out hundreds of e-mails from library
Cody Punter
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, February 11, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Library patrons who have recently received an e-mail warning them they were about to be on the hook for books they never borrowed need not fret.
A glitch in the library's e-mail system on Monday caused hundreds of residents, past and present, to get an unwarranted notification telling them their books would be overdue in three days with a link to where they could renew them.
According to the library's acting manager Kris Solowy, the GNWT was in the middle of updating the Yellowknife branch's notification service to make it easier to renew books online when a glitch caused e-mails to be sent out to hundreds of people.
The territorial government oversees the databases for all the territory's libraries.
Solowy explained the link to the library's site included in the body of the e-mail is not a virus and that the library's confidential information had not been hacked.
"We had asked for some re-wording to be done on the courtesy notice to make it more user-friendly to do a renewal online and unfortunately when they were doing that there was a glitch," she said.
Solowy said the library has received "a number" of phone calls in the past few days - some from people who haven't lived in the city for more than five years. As a result of the concern from the public, the library has changed a prompt on its direct line to notify patrons not to worry about the notifications.
"The silver lining moment is it is helping us clean our database of people who have left and forget to tell us," she said, adding overdue book notifications are no longer being sent out.
