LITS Oct. 2001 Monthly report
Personnel:
As mentioned in last month’s report, Chuck Owen began his 30-day “call-up” from Navy Reserves this month. This initial mobilization has now been followed with word of a one-year assignment. Chuck will continue on Military Leave status during this entire assignment and plans to return to Vanderbilt, and he hopes to the Library, when his assignment ends. Among other things, this means that, once we have official confirmation, LITS will be able to begin a search to fill Chuck’s vacated position, probably in late November.
Susan Banks continued her FMLA leave through October.
Last month, we mentioned the need to temporarily reorganize work among various members of the existing staff to manage these two leaves. For the time being, we have asked Mike Martin to continue work with cdrom-based products supported by Susan’s position, with help from George Anglin. We have also accepted offers of assistance for supporting the Ovid/SilverPlatter ERL products from Chris Benda and Rick Stringer-Hye. Both have completed “basic training” for uploading cdrom images to the ERL server (including a field-trip to the ITS “network operation center” where the ERL server is housed). To address some of the work that Chuck had been doing, we have asked Anne Laws to provide assistance with workstation replacement deployments, with assorted workstation application software requests, and with workstation inventory issues. Anne performed similar duties in her previous position with LTT and has graciously taken these on, while continuing to manage a significant percentage of her current Acorn related duties. In order to provide more of her time for on-site support and workstation deployment work, Judy Carter’s regular help-desk assignments have been significantly reduced. These help-desk duties, along with those formerly provided by Chuck, have been spread across remaining staff, with most staff taking two additional 1.5 hour blocks during the week. We have also accepted an offer of help from the Cataloging Team which has provided time for one of its staff members to begin working to help us prepare a large number of surplus workstations for distribution to the Virtual Schools program. As team leader, I am very proud of this team and their willingness to accept more work on top of their already busy workloads during this time. I also want to express our gratitude to the offers of help that have come from the libraries and from others in Resource Services.
Prior to the issues raised by these leaves, we had been working on developing a new position in LITS. The classification of the new position was completed in October. The position has been classified by HR as an Analyst/Programmer. This position will assist in providing support for a number of existing and emerging services, including
We have begun a search to fill this position and hope to make an appointment in November.
NEW PUBLIC WEB SERVER SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTED
On October 15th, our new public web server went “live.” With a great deal of behind-the-scenes work, we are pleased to say that almost no staff or patrons noticed the migration itself! Many did notice, and have let us know, that the response time of the new server is significantly faster. The “hot cutover” went quite well. The large majority of public web authors were able to work on the new server without changing their workflow. Patrons and users of the web server saw no “down-time.” The new server is running version 4.5 of Netscape Enterprise Server over Novell Netware 5.1. It has dual Xeon GHz processors, 1.5 gigabytes of RAM and a bit more than 80 gigabytes of available storage. In addition to being faster, LITS staff is happy to say that it is already saved time in technical support. In the coming months, we plan to explore the possibility of implementing additional features of the server software.
NEW REQUEST MANAGEMENT SYSTEM DEBUTTED
On October 17th, our new Request Management System went into production. This successor to the older collection of web-based “netfix forms” has already been heavily used by Library staff and has saved hours of administrative overhead in its first few weeks of operation. The system was designed with input from a wide variety of users including the Technology Support Coordinators, the Training Coordinators, LITS staff, OUL staff and others. Marshall Breeding did the coding for the system and has spent countless hours re-coding and “tweaking” it, with constant feedback and suggestions from LITS staff, to help make it as robust and useful as possible. Thanks to all those who have helped design, code, and test this new system. For more details see:
http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/libtech/RMSannounce.html
While we are please with it, we continue to refine this system and its interface with input from you. Please feel free to make suggestions.
FIBER CONNECTION TO CAMPUS BACKBONE MOVED AT GLB
A few years ago, we worked with ACIS staff to upgrade the network equipment in the General Library Building. This past year, we again worked with ITS staff to upgrade the switch in this building to the new gigabit-Ethernet technology. During this entire period, for logistical reasons, we had agreed to leave in place the older fiber connection to the building. This month we agreed that it was time to move the fiber connection from the older communications rack to directly connect to the new gigabit switch. This required down-time for the building which we scheduled for early morning of October 21st. The move went very smoothly, requiring only 1.5 hours of downtime. During this time, the electronic resource database server, located in this building, was unavailable and LITS staff worked to provide on-line notice to our patrons of the situation. We also spent time immediately afterward testing the new connection to make sure it was stable and ready before the first library opened that morning.
PREPARATIONS COMPLETE FOR INSTALLATION OF NEW STORAGE AREA NETWORK
Moving the fiber connection in the GLB and removal of older communications equipment were two of the tasks required as we prepare to install a new 512 Gigabyte (1/2 Terabyte) storage area network (SAN). The SAN will be physically located temporarily in room 301 of the GLB. This equipment, which is planned to be scaled very shortly after installation to a full terabyte, will provide large-scale shared storage for development of the various digital initiatives the Library has underway and is contemplating. The equipment has been purchased from Dell, a leader in this technology, and is scheduled to be installed by Dell engineers the second week of November. In addition to work by LITS and ITS staff, a special note of thanks to Dewey James for helping provide appropriate power connections for this new equipment.
NEW WORKSTATION DEPLOYMENTS NEARING COMPLETION
Even with reduced staffing, we have been able to continue installations of the new Dell P4-based workstations at a very good pace. Between Judy, Anne, Mike and George, we deployed 35 of the new stations this month, nearly depleting our supply from the last reassessment. Roll-outs of displaced, but still viable workstations should begin in November. We also hope to be able to announce plans for another round of new workstations soon.
FACULTY DELIVERY SERVICE
The Faculty Delivery Service went “live” on November 1st. LITS staff worked with others in planning, communications and technical elements to realize this project. Anne Laws worked with the CAG sub-committee to help them determine their needs in terms of policy changes and web forms and then coordinated the interface creation with Dale Poulter and Suellen Stringer-Hye. We then created messenger pseudopatrons for all the participating libraries, edited all the overdue and recall reports to reflect the change from owning to charging library, and confirmed circulation policies for the included item and faculty types.
RE-WRITE OF PATRON-LOAD SCRIPT
Over the years, we have experienced occasional problems with the patron load scripts that import information provided by the registrar into Acorn. This month, we took the time to re-conceive and write the scripts “from scratch.” The new scripts are designed to first test whether any information has changed since the last patron load and, if it has not, to do nothing with the file. They also contain improved error checking and handling, including automated notification of LITS staff in the event of any critical error condition. We’ve tested the scripts on our backup server and are confident that they will address many of the problems we have seen over the past several years. We continue to work with ITS and the registrar’s office to address our concerns about the delivery method of the patron information and the timing of the delivery. Until these concerns are addressed, we will perform several steps in the patron load manually (rather than on a fully-automated schedule).
TESTING UNICORN 2001
This month we refreshed the installation of Unicorn 2001 on our AcornTest server to begin the process of testing features in the new release. We have developed a documented testing protocol for this and will be working with each of the workgroups to test the new release as thoroughly as possible.
EZPROXY SERVICE EXTENDED
This month, at their request, we worked to provide proxy services for the Student Government Association’s Online Course Evaluation Booklet website. This is a valuable resource at any University, but one that needs to be carefully restricted. See:
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/sga/ceb/CEB.html
We worked with ITS staff to implement restrictions for the site and setup proxy services so that Vanderbilt students would be able to access it from off-campus locations.
VIRTUAL REFERENCE TASK FORCE
LITS staff, primarily Suellen Stringer-Hye, collaborated with the Web Task Force and Virtual Reference Task Force to help launch the pilot Virtual Reference project.
IPX/NDS PROBLEM ON CAMPUS NETWORK
Earlier in the month, we became aware of a set of networking problems affecting primarily the Music and Education libraries. The primary symptoms were extremely long login times and/or the inability of the Netware client to locate the Library’s NDS tree. LITS staff spent significant time working to resolve the problem, eventually enlisting the help of ITS network engineers and equipment. Ultimately, we discovered that one or more Windows NT/2000 servers on campus were configured to use IPX (the networking protocol used by our Novell servers). These servers are unable to provide client workstations with reliable information about NDS (novell directory services), however. As a result, these servers were “confusing” the routers on campus about the location of NDS services which were, in turn, unable to route the client workstation calls for service correctly. We have since requested that changes be made to the campus routers to take this problem into account and we have reconfigured workstations on the affected subnets so that they do not use older “bindery” based name services. The latter change has been implemented and resolved the problems for our users immediately.
In addition to meeting with various committees, workgroups and task forces, among our other routine duties this month we: