Technical Services Report: August 2008

System news and work completed

Attended Ex Libris Technical seminars at ELUNA in Long Beach, California and survived an earthquake.
Presented information about Aleph version 19 to the PALS staff.
Installed the July version 18 service pack release on the production server on August 10th.
Backups are running on the new backup tape library.
Set up and installed two new servers.
Completed global deletes for Rasmussen College (RCS).
Loaded a number of prompt cat record sets for Minnesota School of Business (MSB).
Completed the initial Discovery Tool Task Force recommendations for production. It will go live on Friday August 15th and is called MnPALS Plus. The new URL is: plus.mnpals.net

Ongoing system maintenance and upgrades.
Attending Indexing Task Force meetings.
Attending the PALS Communication Team meeting.
Continuing to work on PALS Support Center tickets.
Continuing to work with the UNIX system monitoring software. Will be working with the student systems administration assistant to learn and work with Nagios.
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.
The process to delete expired patron records (p-cir-77) will be run the week of August 25th.
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 of Ex Libris.
Addressing post-upgrade problem reports.
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.

Working with OCLC to implement Link Manager.
Attending OCLC’s web training sessions with the libraries that have been configured and set up.
CUFTS has been installed on a server and we are looking at the technical requirements and issues. We will be working on populating the database next.
Met with Todd Digby to discuss our team purpose, funding, ask questions, and share the team’s progress.