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Technical Services Report: April 2008

System news and work completed

  • MSU facilities will be moving an air conditioner in the Data Center beginning on April 28th and the work will occur over several days. There is a concern about overheating while the work is taking place, but should be monitored and addressed by facilities.
  • Attended the spring user group meetings in St. Cloud and presented breakout sessions on communications. The topic focused primarily on the Forum, but the Wiki and the mailing lists were also discussed. The Thursday sessions were well attended.
  • Reindexed the keywords on Lute the weekend of April 12th to test indexing changes recommended by the Indexing Task Force.
  • Installed the latest release of the version 18 service pack.
  • Completed a third version 18/ILL2/Oracle 10G upgrade on the development server, dev18 zone.
  • Aleph tables on dev18 were synced up with Harp on April 3, 2008.
  • Loaded the NetLibrary OCLC West Region Shared EBook collection set for Minnesota School of Business (MSB).
  • Loaded the April Marcive records for St. Cloud State University (SCS), St. John’s/St. Ben’s (SBJ), Bemidji State University (BSU), and Gustavus Adolphus College (GAC).
  • Attended a two day informational demo on LibLime’s open source ILS, Koha.
  • Completed global changes for St. Cloud State University (SCS).
  • Completed SIP authentication through Visonware for Winona State University (WSU).
  • Tested a fix for the Marcive loader. The 049 multiple symbol and holdings records problem is resolved, but the matching problem still exists.
  • Attended the Reference Workday and gave a Discovery Tool presentation.
  • Attended the Annual Meeting and gave a Discovery Tool presentation.

Work in progress

  • Ongoing system maintenance and upgrades.
  • Attending Indexing Task Force meetings.
  • Attending the PALS Communication Team meetings.
  • Will be attending a two day informational demo on Evergreen which is another open source ILS on April 29th and 30th.
  • Continuing to work on PALS Support Center tickets.
  • Continuing to work with the UNIX system monitoring software.
  • Continuing to perform weekly updates to the Authorities database on Harp.
  • Working on a new disaster and file recovery plan for backups.
  • Working on a global change to delete subfield 3 Bibliographic record display in 856 fields from NetLibrary bib records per request from the Reference Users Group. There are approximately 400,000 records that will be changed. Completed 200,000 bib record changes, and the remaining records will be changed on the following dates: 4/26/08 and 5/3/08.
  • Working on SQL reports and services recommended by the Reports Group.
  • Continuing to work on the Discovery Tool. Working with vufind which is an open source software package written in PHP that builds web pages, sends queries and fetches information from the database. It uses the Apache SOLR interface to the Lucene database which stores the MARC records plus an additional MySQL database to save data record sets. It uses x-services in Aleph to retrieve real-time availability and holdings information. It appears to be designed better, have more robust functionality and scalability than the open source software fac-back OPAC which is written in Python.
  • Working on some global changes for Century College (CEN).
  • Testing version 18 rep changes and reporting problems to Ex Libris.
  • Planning the production version 18/ILL2/Oracle 10G upgrade tasks.
  • EZProxy is being used in production at South Central College (SCC).
  • EZProxy was installed at Minnesota State University Moorhead (TRM) and Concordia College Moorhead (TRC) and is being tested.
  • Working on EZProxy migration and installs for other libraries.
  • Working on systems prep work and setting up a server for the Evergreen demo on April 29th and 30th.
  • Met with Collier and SUN representatives to discuss new hardware and tape library.
  • Will be purchasing a new rack, miscellaneous hardware, and at least two more servers for proxy services.
  • Discussing outstanding Support Incidents with Greg Gosselin, Manager of Support Services for Ex Libris.
  • A fix for the open URL ILL requests in version 18/Integrated ILL is working. The submit request functionality in Aleph is working, but it requires that all libraries change how they send open URLs. A rewrite was written to correct and send the old formatted open URL requests to provide a workaround while in transition. A problem with open URL requests from EBSCO still needs to be fixed.
  • Waiting for p_manage_18_p (record loader using parallel processes), and “golem” fixes from Ex Libris.
  • Waiting to hear from Ex Libris about problems with discounts and funds when using Blackwell’s Book Services Collection Manager to create order records in Aleph.
  • ISRS is ready to test the cash file process, but we need an enhancement to the Aleph processes that handle this function. An enhancement request was submitted to Ex Libris. We will be working on an alternative as time permits.
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