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Technical Services Report:
Spring 2008 User Groups

System Operations

  • Completed the hardware and operating system upgrades on our production and development servers. The servers are identical Sun 6900s running on Solaris 10.
  • Installed Media Wiki and Simple Machines Forum (SMF) software.
  • Installed NetBackup on the development server.
  • Released an alpha version of the Discovery Tool in February, 2008. It can be accessed at the following location: http://solr.mnpals.net/
  • Created a new board on the MnPALS forum for Discovery Tool questions, discussion, bug reports, and enhancement suggestions at the following location: http://forums.mnpals.org/index.php?board=35.0
  • The mailing lists have been merged into the following two lists: mnpals-discuss@lists.mnpals.org and mnpals-announce@lists.mnpals.org
  • An announcement was sent in February with instructions on how to subscribe to the lists. The mnpals-discuss mailing list should be used to post any messages to the MnPALS consortium list members, and the mnpals-announce mailing list will be used by the PALS staff to post important systems-related messages to MnPALS consortium members of the list. The following child boards were also created on the forum for functional information sharing and communication: Interlibrary Loan, Cataloging, Acquisitions, Serials, Circulation, Systems, and Reference. These can be accessed at the following location: http://forums.mnpals.org/index.php?board=3.0
  • Installed CUFTS on a virtual machine. It is an open source open URL link resolver.
  • Installed Koha on a virtual machine. It is an open source ILS. Attended a two day Koha training session.
  • Ongoing system maintenance, security patches, and upgrades.

Aleph

Task Forces, Presentations, Committees, Training:

  • Attended Discovery Tool Task Force meetings.
  • Attended Cognos ReportNet Authoring training.
  • Attended Linux training.
  • Attending Indexing Task Force web meetings.

Enhancements, Fixes, Miscellaneous:

  • Set up a job to automate the Discovery Tool database updates, and it runs every morning.
  • Installed EZProxy and set up South Central College (SCC). It uses LDAP authentication. Working on migrating other libraries from LibProxy to EZProxy and adding new libraries to EZProxy.
  • Ex Libris announced that service packs will move to a quarterly release schedule for all versions of Aleph.
  • Continuing to work on PALS Support Center tickets.

Record Loads:

  • Performing weekly updates to the Authority database on Harp.
  • Loaded the Marcive records for the Marcive subscriber libraries through March, 2008.
  • Loaded several sets of NetLibrary records for various libraries that purchased the sets.

Reports:

  • The Executive Committee recommended that we do not pursue the purchase of ARC2 because of the higher than expected price quote from Ex Libris. There are contractual issues to pursue related to the inability by Ex Libris to provide a report writer tool at the cost specified in our contract.
  • Many custom reports (mnpals-xx) have been added to the services menus in the Aleph Cataloging, Circulation, and Acquisitions/Serials modules. An Excel spreadsheet listing all of the reports that are available in Aleph can be found by clicking on the MnPALS Support Center button from the PALS home page and selecting the “Documentation” and “List of Aleph Services and Reports” links at: http://www.mnpals.org/
  • Fixed the totals in the Acquisitions report, Titles Per Budget Spent (mnpals-28), to account for credit transactions.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI):

  • Completed testing and set up of Yankee Book Peddler’s GOBI product and implemented it in production for St. John’s/St. Ben’s (SJU).
  • Tested EDI book orders with The Book House. It is ready for any interested library to test also.
  • Set up all existing EDI functionality in version 18 in the Dev18 zone on our development server.

Version 17:

  • Completed global changes and deletes as requested by libraries.
  • Service packs are being released quarterly.
  • The keywords were re-indexed in November of 2007.
  • Populated the z106 Catalogers table for bib and holdings records. Removed all but the last five catalogers who edited the records from the bib and holdings records.
  • Removed the holdings records (sys60) templates from the production, development, and Dev18 servers per request and approval of the Cataloging Users Group and relocated them to the following locations: http://tables.dev18.mnpals.net/u18_1/sys60/pc_tab/catalog/templates/

Version 18 and Oracle:

  • Ex Libris completed version 18 and Oracle 10G installations on October 29, 2007.
  • Version 18 was installed on the development server (Tenor) in the version 18 zone (Dev18).
  • Performed three version 18/ILL2 and Oracle 10G upgrades on Dev18.
  • Fixed the service menus in version 18 to be consistent with version 17.
  • Working on manual changes and set up for version 18 and Integrated ILL2.
  • Finished customization of the ILL GUI form templates from ILL web forms for all 63 ADMs.
  • Continuing to report version 18 and ILL2 problems to Ex Libris.
  • Installed the April service pack.
  • The final version 18/ILL/Oracle upgrade on our production server is scheduled to begin late on May 29, 2008 and complete on June 1, 2008. A detailed version of the version 18/ILL2 project plan can be found on the MnPALS Forum.
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