Credo Reference Blog

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On Monday, September 21, Credo’s CEO, Mike Sweet, and President, John Dove, visited Bloomsbury Publishing Plc in London to present Nigel Newton, CEO of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, with a Credo Publisher Award for earning a total of more than $500,000 in royalties from Credo. They are the first publisher to pass this threshold. Credo currently has content from 36 titles from among the following Bloomsbury imprints: Bloomsbury, A&C Black, Peter Collin, and Wisden. The A&C Black titles “Business: The Ultimate Resource”, “Black’s Medical Dictionary”, and “Black’s Veterinary Dictionary” are among some of the most popular titles on the Credo platform. The Bloomsbury name is known for its strong coverage of some of the staples of a good reference collection: dictionaries, etymologies, thesauri, biographical and quotation dictionaries.

In addition to meeting with Nigel Newton, we also met with Richard Charkin (former Chairman of Credo Reference) and Jonathan Glasspool (director of Bloomsbury Academic). After celebrating this milestone, the discussion turned to new Bloomsbury titles that could be added to the Credo Reference Service moving forward.

It almost goes without saying that the publishing world is in a great upheaval. Big winners, like Bloomsbury’s winning pick to publish J K Rowling’s Harry Potter, stand out in contrast to the general trend. So we are grateful that Bloomsbury took a bet on Credo Reference in our early days—when getting a growing annuity from subscriptions to reference book content was a novel idea. We’re pleased that this bet paid off and continues to do so.

Look to the future to see more Bloomsbury titles added to Credo’s reference platform. As we continue to build our service, we know that providing strong financial return to our publishing partners is critical to our long-run success.

We’ve introduced a couple of members of our Corporate Advisory Board on our blog already. The board is composed of a variety of professionals, many of whom work to create innovative models of digitizing information. So you may not be surprised to know that, as a group, they have a very strong internet presence, especially in the realm of social media and networking.

Of our board of nineteen, a dozen members have active profiles on LinkedIn to make professional connections. A dozen are also on Facebook or have blogs to share their own outlooks and ideas. Whereas these networking sites are often private and personal, Twitter is a more public space where people can have an interactive conversation about the topics that interest them. A handful of our board members are part of the Twitterverse, and we’ve found that they, along with uncountable others, have been expanding their answers to the question “what are you doing” by reflecting on what has been done in the past and asking what it is possible to do in the futures of their various fields. We thought that you might want to keep your ears open for their tweets, and that we’d point you in their direction. (After all, who doesn’t want more followers?)

www.twitter.com/emckean – Erin McKean, the “Dictionary Evangelist,” is currently CEO of Wordnik, an online dictionary that defines and explores words through quotations, pictures from Flickr, usage graphs, examples from live Twitter feeds, and other media. You can also follow @wordnik to learn more.

www.twitter.com/schottsvocab – Ben Schott, the creator of Schott’s Original Miscellany, tweets in connection with his NY Times blog, ‘Schott’s Vocab’.

www.twitter.com/peterscott – Peter Scott, as his twitter bio says, ‘[builds] web-based indexes and resources’ of all kinds, including Libdex, a worldwide online Library Index.

www.twitter.com/lindastone – Both an Apple and Microsoft veteran, and once a children’s librarian, Linda Stone contributes to current thought and research about the interaction of technology and people, especially online social networking.

www.twitter.com/joejanes – Joseph Janes, Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Academics at the Information School of the University of Washington, speaks and writes extensively on librarianship, technology, and their relationship.

www.twitter.com/resourceshelf – Gary Price is a librarian, information research consultant, and writer based in suburban Washington D.C. Gary is the editor and compiler of ResourceShelf, a daily electronic newsletter featuring news and other resources of interest to the online researcher, which also has a twitter feed.

So, if you’re curious to see where Credo gets some of its inspiration, check out what they have to say! You can also follow us at www.twitter.com/credoreference.

Behind the Scenes is a regular feature of the Credo Reference Blog. Each post describes an aspect of our content, service or development process not normally seen by our customers.

In a typical week, credoreference.com is visited by thousands of users searching for information, viewing entries, looking at images, saving citations, and exploring information using our Concept Map. This happens at the same time that meta search systems like Webfeat are requesting result sets and sites such as the UK’s National Health Service are pulling information in XML format for use on their web site.

While our users are browsing, we are often adding new content, updating existing content or even updating system software. Occasionally, we even upgrade or replace servers. Many sites schedule downtime to perform updates like these. We’ve made it part of our standard practice to run our site continuously.

So how do we do that? It’s really pretty simple.

The most important technique we use is to run many complete copies of our service. Each copy runs on a separate server. When a user connects, they are assigned to one of the servers. From that point on in their session, all of the searches, entries they view and other activities are handled by their assigned server. This assignment process is handled by a load balancer, a special device that monitors all of our servers and assigns new users to the one that is least loaded.

A block diagram of the Credo Service. A load balancer assigns new users to least loaded server

This architecture makes it easy to do updates without any downtime. We start by disconnecting the first server from the load balancer. Any users are immediately reassigned to the least loaded of the remaining servers. We then update the disconnected server. Once updated, we reconnect it. It will then begin to share the overall load as newly connecting users get assigned to it. We then repeat the process with the second, third and remaining servers. This is all done with an automated script so timing details and other possible types of errors are avoided.

While the update is occurring, some of our users will see the pre-update version of our service and some the post-update. It’s even possible for someone to see the pre and post update versions in a single session. The most frequent change is new title additions, so if you’re ever using Credo and a new title appears, you’ve probably experienced an update firsthand.

Besides updating the content and software, this architecture makes it easy to update the hardware. At one point, we actually did a major upgrade, replacing all servers with no downtime. We just replaced them one at a time.

All of this would be for nought if the servers themselves got disconnected, damaged or cut off from the Internet. To ensure that doesn’t happen, all of our servers are in a secure facility managed by Rackspace, a US based company with facilities around the world. Their centers are staffed 24 hours a day and have redundant power, air conditioning, fire suppression, backup power and fiber data lines that enter at separate points, so short of a really major disaster they’ll keep running.