Technical Services Report: December 2009

System news and work completed

1. Installed the September release version 19 service pack on production on November 15, 2009.
2. Increased the Oracle file system size on the development server to be the same size as the production server.
3. Cloned the production database on the development server. The database on development is current to the production backup data from November 21, 2009.
4. Re-indexed the database on development and copied it to production during Thanksgiving week. More details about the new indexes can be found at the following link: http://www.mnpals.org/aleph/idx200911.pdf
5. Updated validation tables to accommodate the new indexes.
6. Added a special match routine for MSU Mankato for records they export from OCLC. It contains three match points: 945##, 935 no indicators, $$a, 035##, $$a. It will try to make a match with the 945 field first, then the 935 field, and then the 035 field.
7. Moved the new generic vendor records loader (file-90) to production. This will allow libraries to load records from various sources. It includes special fix, match, and merge routines. System setup and training is required before its use or it will not work correctly and corrupt the database.

Work in progress

1. Converted bibs, items, holds, patrons, loans, and fines data to Evergreen three times. This is for testing purposes to gain experience in conversion to Evergreen and learn the Evergreen system.
2. Downloading and installing the latest version 19 service pack on development.
3. Will be loading a couple of weeks of the Authority updates on development to test the new process and get a sense of the load on system resources.
4. Will be loading the weekly Authority updates from the first week of August to the present on the production server. Once we begin this, ue-08 will be turned back on so that bib headings will be flipped to the new Authority headings.
5. Will be working on identifying the Bib records that had the 150 field with subdivisions of $$v, $$x or $$z incorrectly updated during the brief time that ue-08 was turned on in August 2009. We do not expect that there were very many that were incorrectly updated, and if this is correct, we will fix them. If we identify a lot of records, a list will be provided to the libraries so they can fix them.
6. After the backlog of Authority updates has been completed, we will be working on updating the existing Bib record fields that need flipping. There are approximately 3 million records that need updating, so this will be done over a series of weekends to keep the indexing from impacting system resources.
7. Working on the technical set up for the ERM resource list (CRDB). ERM set up and testing will be done on the PALSconnect production server.
8. Will be removing the Rasmussen data from Aleph since they are officially no longer using our system. This will be done on development first. Since this has never been done before, we need to thoroughly test this before removing their data on production.
9. Investigating a problem that several non-MnSCU libraries have reported about some pc clients hanging in the cataloging module. We suspect that it has to do with peer-to-peer content filtering software. This has been reported to Ex Libris, and in the meantime, we have a workaround.
10. Working on change requests and reported problems for the PALSconnect Linker.