Technical Services Report: July 2008

System news and work completed

Mike Barnett has really retired. His last day at PALS was June 30th.
Attended ALA conferences in Anaheim, California.
Beta tested the July release of version 18 rep changes.
Installed the July version 18 service pack release on the development server.
Installed a new backup tape library and system and a new rack. It is up and running.
Two servers for proxy services have arrived.
Completed global changes the Century College (CEN).
The faulted disk on the SAN and other sundry problems has been resolved.
Loaded a number of prompt cat record sets for Minnesota School of Business (MSB).
Hired one student worker to help with UNIX systems administration.

Work in progress

Ongoing system maintenance and upgrades.
Attending Indexing Task Force meetings.
Attending the PALS Communication Team meetings.
Attended a staff strategic planning retreat.
Will be attending the Ex Libris Technical seminars at ELUNA in Long Beach, California on July 27th and 28th.
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 the production server.
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.
Working on configuring the Authority tables to test the new functionality in version 18.
Working on EZProxy migration and installs for other libraries.
Discussing outstanding Support Incidents with Alan Manifold.
Addressing post-upgrade problem reports.
Tested a fix for discounts and funds when using Blackwell’s Book Services Collection Manager to create order records in Aleph. The fix works. The rep change is in the July service pack released.
Tested the Marcive loader. There are fixes for the matching and multiple 049 symbols in the July service pack. The matching routine is working. The 049 multiple symbol problem is not quite working the way we want yet, but it is almost there. We are still unable to control when to create item records the way we need it to, and the problem was reported to 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.

Open URL Team

Working with OCLC to implement Link Manager. OCLC has set up configuration for Minneapolis Community and Technical College (MCT), Southwest Minnesota State University (SSU), Bethany Lutheran College (BLC), College of St. Scholastica (CSS), and Inver Hills Community College (IHC) so far. Dakota County Technical College (DCT) decided to purchase Link Manager. Hibbing Community College (HCC), Riverland Community College Libraries (RVL), and South Central College Libraries (SCC) want Link Manager, but have not returned their configuration questionnaires yet.
Set up an internal, closed list serve for Link Manager to monitor support questions between OCLC and the libraries. Perry is the moderator of the list serve and members are Paul Moss and Paul Singleton from Link Manager Support at OCLC, Linda, Steve, Perry Sonja, and Deb.
Will be attending some web training sessions between OCLC and the Link Manager libraries that have been already been configured.
Will be looking at other open source link resolvers and will start with CUFTS.