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Technical Services Report: May 2008

System news and work completed

  • A bad hard drive in the media tray attached to the production server (Alto) caused problems with the formatting command when setting up the disk space for the version 18 zone and was replaced.
  • Working on the production system prep for the version 18 zone on Alto.
  • Will be ordering a new backup tape library and system and a new rack.
  • Ordered two more servers for proxy services.
  • Completed system prep and server setup for Evergreen.
  • Created a new service (mnpals-09) in Circulation under Patron Records to update patron privileges by patron status in version 18. A patron status and permissions are selected for the patron status. It reads tab31 and the z305 table will be updated for all patrons with the selected patron status. This service will be needed for Booking. There is a basic help screen, but it needs to be enhanced yet.
  • Loaded the NetLibrary OCLC West Region Shared EBook collection set for University Center Rochester (UCR)
  • Loaded three NetLibrary collection sets of records for Minnesota School of Business (MSB).
  • Loaded the May Marcive records for St. Cloud State University (SCS), St. John’s/St. Ben’s (SBJ), Bemidji State University (BSU), and Gustavus Adolphus College (GAC).
  • Loaded a special OCLC collection set of records for St. Cloud State University (SCS).
  • Attended a two day informational demo on Equinox’s open source ILS, Evergreen.
  • Completed a global change to remove subfield 3 (Bibliographic record display) in the 856 fields of nearly 400,000 NetLibrary records per request by the Reference User’s Group.
  • Tested fixes for the Marcive loader. The matching problem appears to be resolved, but there is still a problem with multiple symbols in the 049 field. Now that the matching routine is working, it does not load a second holdings or item record for the second symbol in the Marcive record 049 field. It matches on the Bib record, and goes to the next record, and the second collection code is ignored. The latest test results have been submitted to Ex Libris.
  • Attended a Discovery Tool Task force meeting.
  • Attended the Annual MINITEX ILL Conference.
  • The three new Innovation Teams: Open URL Link Resolver, Open ILS, and the Discovery Tool have all had kickoff meetings.

Work in progress

  • Ongoing system maintenance and upgrades.
  • Attending Indexing Task Force meetings.
  • Attending the PALS Communication Team meetings.
  • 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 SQL reports and services recommended by the Reports Group.
  • Continuing to work on the Discovery Tool and VuFind. Working on recommendations from the Discovery Tool Task Force. The plan is to have it up and running sometime in early August.
  • Working on some global changes for Century College (CEN). They will be merging their EAST sublibrary into CEN on May 20, 2008.
  • Testing version 18 rep changes and reporting problems to Ex Libris.
  • Planning the production version 18/ILL2/Oracle 10G upgrade tasks.
  • Working on EZProxy migration and installs for other libraries.
  • Greg Gosselin has changed roles at Ex Libris and Alan Manifold has been named the Aleph Team Lead. Discussing outstanding Support Incidents with Alan Manifold.
  • A fix for the open URL ILL requests in version 18/Integrated ILL is working. EBSCO is re-writing their requests to work with Aleph and it should be working when we go into production.
  • Tested a fix for discounts and funds when using Blackwell’s Book Services Collection Manager to create order records in Aleph. The fix we tested did not work, but there is another fix that is supposed to work in version 18.
  • Working with OCLC to create a test file of Bib records with local holdings information from Aleph to use for their WorldCat Local development work.
  • Waiting for p_manage_18_p (record loader using parallel processes), and “golem” fixes from Ex Libris.
  • 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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