Some of the projects and issues addressed by the Library Technology Team during March included: (Please see individual team member reports for much more information)

• Nearing completion of project to replace BFAS.
• Replacement of LIBRARY7 hardware platform.
• Researched and began work on providing EZProxy services for Eskind Biomedical Library.
• Updated 24 SilverPlatter ERL databases.
• Updated 6 Netware CDROM-based databases
• Installed Acorn3 (Acorn backup server--basic installation)
• Helped develop SDCC staff training proposal.
• Faclitate formatting and uploading of another ETD (Anthea Butler, Grad. Dept. of Rel.)
• Continued refining configuration for KUDZU as member libraries provide information.
• Updated hardware inventory database and tcp/ip address assignments.
• Replaced 14 Workstations. (see planning document).
• Added or changed 7 URL's for web-based database products.
• Added 1 and updated 1 Trail database link.
• Worked on Sigaux Web Exhibit.
• Made several Acorn user and format policy changes.
• Developed several custom scripts for Acorn.
• Responded to several brief service outages (see Server Problem Log for details).
• Held Technology Support Coordinators' meeting (see TSC minutes).
• Continued work with the Women’s Center and Center for Teaching libraries and staff on getting their collections on line and getting them circulating via Acorn.

Acorn Statistics:

A total of 31126 Acorn user sessions occurred during the month of March 2001

This includes 73251 searches from the iconized form, 5033 complex searches, 574 callnumber browse searches, and 149 crossreference or genre searches

ATHENA Statistics:

Total number of logins: 3227
Total number of searches: 8478
Total number of ILL requests: 377

• Vanderbilt logins: 1085
• Vanderbilt Law logins: 0
• Vanderbilt Biomedical logins: 3
• Nashville Public logins: 382
• Fisk logins: 0
• Belmont logins: 172
• Volunteer State logins: 163
• Austin Peay logins: 0
• MTSU logins: 475
• Nashville State Tech logins: 169
• Trevecca logins: 0
• TSU logins: 333
• Aquinas logins: 0
• Lipscomb logins: 91
• General Public logins: 354

KUDZU Statistics:

Total number of logins: 2103
Total number of searches: 4270
Total number of ILL requests: 380

• ASERL logins: 0
• ASERLLAW logins: 0
• ASERLBIOMED logins: 10
• ASERLPUBLIC logins: 0
• Auburn logins: 97
• Clemson logins: 2
• Development logins: 205
• Mississippi State logins: 15
• Tulane logins: 79
• U of Alabama - Birmingham logins: 0
• U of Alabama logins: 28
• U of Kentucky logins: 4
• U of Louisville logins: 125
• U of Mississippi logins: 127
• U of South Carolina logins: 4
• U of Tennessee logins: 625
• Vanderbilt logins: 727
• Virginia Commonwealth logins: 17
• Wake Forest logins: 38

Service Interruptions: No major, extended service interruptions during March. Several brief interruptions.

• See Server Problem Log for details.

Malware (virus, trojan, worm) activity: No workstation infections to report for the month.

• 32 viruses were intercepted by the Micro Trend Interscan VirusWall email scanner during March.

This month we interviewed two candidates for our open CSA III position.

Our team held an annual review retreat as part of our annual review process held on March 2 at Scarritt. Nancy, Anne and Dale were in charge of planning and leading the event.

Jody Combs attend the Fourth Annual Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations. March 21-24, Pasadena, CA.

Suellen Stringer-Hye attended the Knowledge Technologies conference, March 4-7, Austin Texas
http://www.gca.org/attend/2001_conferences/kt_2001/default.htm

All team members attended a demonstration given by Dale Poulter on the basics of the unix OS.

All team members completed the supervisor interview portion of the annual performance review process.

All team members participated in the Time-Cost Study survey.

• Susan Banks
• Nancy Boggess
• Judy Carter
• Jody Combs
• Isabelle Crist
• Anne Laws
• Mike Martin
• Dale Poulter
• Chuck Owen
• Suellen Stringer-Hye

Suellen

SEARCH COMMITTEE FOR CSAIII

• Continued to meet with candidates
• Continued discussing various options for the position

ACORN TASK FORCE

• Looked at websites for useful featurese
• Discussed usability study options

WEB TASK FORCE

• Handling Proxy server communications
• Reviewed Web stats for electronic resources

BAUDELAIRE/SIGAUX WEB EXHIBIT

• Worked with Isabelle to set final templates for slideshow
• Looked at XML options for presentation.Decided to go with straight HTML but will look at converting to XML in the future.

TRAINING COORDINATORS

• Met with SDCC to discuss Training Proposal
• Proposal now in the hands of SDCC

CONFERENCE

• Attended Knowledge Technologies, March 4-7, Austin Texas
  http://www.gca.org/attend/2001_conferences/kt_2001/default.htm

ADDITIONAL

• LTT Retreat,
• Meeting with the Knowledge Management Task Force,
• Help Desk Duties,
• Handling netfix requests including web page editing and assisting patrons with connection problems.
• Continued updating web pages for UUGI Conference.
  

Nancy

In addition to her monthly duties of providing RS cataloging statistics, creating the Februrary New Titles pages for the VU Library Website and running a couple of other monthly reports, Nancy spent a lot of time this month on projects and custom reports and Acorn editing.

PROJECTS

• The retrieval, editing, loading into Acorn and again editing of the 10,973 NetLibrary records. Nancy retrieved these from OCLC, did global editing on the records to add the 949 field which tells the Acorn load program what specific call no., location, item type and circ status to assign to the items it creates for each title. The records were loaded with a special bibload report that loaded them as cataloged with the library INTERNET, the call no. AVAILABLE ONLINE, location WEBACCESS and item type E-BOOK. She also deleted the 994 field to prevent the records from being extracted by the automated Marcive processing programs, since the records were sent to Marcive for authority and TOC processing before they were loaded into Acorn. Once the records were loaded, Nancy edited them to add a 506 field to prevent non-Vanderbilt users from accessing the records and she also changed the circulation status from non-circ to circulating. Nancy has been working on this project since January of this year and was very pleased to see it completed and to see that users were already accessing the records the day after they were loaded!
• The identification and removal of the Placement File records for the Management library. At the request of Rosemary Madill, Nancy removed 650 records for Placement Files that had been on Reserve in Management.
• The addition of the 506 field to 540 records in Biomedical in preparation for their switching over to using the EZProxy for authentication of user access to 7 different collections of e-journals.
• Worked with Dale and Anne in testing the new server that will be used as a fail-over server for Acorn when Acorn is having problems or being upgraded. This project is on-going.

CUSTOM REPORTS

• A report for Rosemary Madill in Management listing the Placement File record titlesA report for Rosemary Madill in Management listing the placement File record titles, how many times they had circulated and the last date of circulation
  
• A report for Linda Tesar in Law of all of the titles in the KZ call number range.
  
• A report for Annette Williams in Biomedical of all of the titles that had the 506 field added to them.
  
• A script that unshadowed a couple of shadowed periodical titles that had become shadowed due to a bug in Unicorn 99.
• Nancy worked with Zora Breeding to create a report in Acorn that Zora can use for obtaining statistics
  

ACORN POLICY CHANGES

• Modified776 field in all formats for display variation 1 for indicator 1=0 to display label and only certain subfields.
  
• Added display variation 2 for indicator 1=1 to not display by excluding all subfields and making label “Add.'l formats-ND”. This change in policies was needed for the correct display of the NetLibrary records which all have 776 fields.
• Added a field labeled PAYSTATUS to the invoice extended information.

ACORN USER ACCOUNTS/ACCOUNT MAINTENANCE

Nancy created several new Acorn user ID’s for new staff and worked with Anne Laws on a problem with the authorizations for some staff disappearing from the Acorn policies, preventing staff from performing functions without an override. They found by testing in Acorntest that Unicorn 2000 has corrected this problem and discovered through working with the Sirsi helpdesk that there is a way to work around the problem until we upgrade.

COMMUNICATIONS WITH SIRSI

Nancy also communicated with Sirsi on some other problems having to do with the new 880 alternate representation field which is beginning to show up in records for Chinese and other non-English titles that have the titles in the records in foreign characters. With information she obtained from Sirsi, Nancy will be adding the 880 field to the format policies and changing the display policies for some other fields as well so that the linking fields associated with the 880 will not display to users.

ACORN DOCUMENTATION

• Nancy also created a webpage for the RS Cataloging and Authorities Documentation website that describes the 9XX fields that are used in Acorn records.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

• Nancy helped plan and attended the LTT team retreat,
• attended meetings of RSIG and
• took a few days off to visit her horses in Arkansas. Congratulations are in order: it’s a boy!
  

Dale

BFAS PROJECT

During the first part of March Dale worked with the BFAS team to determine what cleanup of the database was needed. The Dale worked to MIS to confirm that the data that we are sending to MIS could be loaded into PeopleSoft. Several problems were encountered at MIS that required Dale to make additional programming changes.

ACORN3--ACORN BACKUP SERVER

Dale spent the majority of March working the the new Acorn3 failover (backup) server. The server was ordered during the second week of March and was received on the 16th. The next couple of weeks Dale spent installing the operating system, creating the file systems and installing several patches. Dale also worked with Eric Hall to get kerberos installed on the server. Dale then began developing procedures and scripts to copy data from Acorn to Acorn3. Once, the data was copied Dale work with Anne, Nancy, and Suellen to begin testing the new server and testing procedures for transfering data between the two systems. The acorn3 server will also be used as a backup for the proxy server. Dale began install perl and the needed modules to enable the authentication to
work on acorn3.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

• working with Annette and Jerry at the Biomedical library to determine if collaborating with the library's proxy server would work well for Biomedical when VUProxy is turned off. As a result of these discussions Dale worked with Jerry to develop scripts to allow updates to be put into the proxy server in an automated fashion.
• Dale also resolved various other problems including 27 netfix requests.

Jody

LIBRARY TECHNOLOGY TEAM ANNUAL RETREAT

LTT held its first annual retreat in March. All LTT staff attended. The retreat was an opportunity to reflect on our mission and the goals and objectives for LTT in the context of the wider mission of the Library and those for whom we provide services.

HARDWARE UPGRADE FOR LIBRARY7 (Central and Science & Engineering Libraries Public Server)

As mentioned last month, it was necessary to delay the hardware platform upgrade for LIBRARY7 until the first Sunday in Spring Break. Jody and Marshall Breeding performed the upgrade Sunday night/Monday morning (March 4/5). We're happy to report that the legacy hardware and software running the legacy hardware appears to be generally working well. We have experienced some erratic problems with the Mercury 40 Jukebox and Discview (software), but for the most part have been able to salvage the functionality these provide. We are continuing to investigate a few titles that have been particularly stubborn with this transition. This hardware upgrade allows us to begin the server-side configuration changes needed to accomplish our network operating system upgrade (to Netware 5.1).

RECONCEIVE SPECIAL COLLECTION PHOTO ARCHIVE DIGITIZATION PROJECT:

Early in March, several problems surfaced with the planned project to digitize the Photo Archives of the Special Collections Library, which was already partially underway. Some of the problems were of deemed to be of sufficient magnitude to require that the project approach be reconceived. Jody was appointed to work with OUL, Juanita Murray, Lynn Cradick (Creative Services), and Judy Orr (Creative Services) to reconceive the Library's approach to these tasks and place our efforts on a different footing. Details about the new approach will be published later in April or early May.

EZPROXY FOR EBL PROJECT

As part of the new campus computing security architecture, the proxy services provided by ITS through VUProxy will eventually be discontinued. The server on which this services is based is unable to authenticate in a sufficiently secure (encrypted) manner. Heard Library is well-prepared for this change, since we implemented EZProxy (which is secure) last year. In March, Eskind Biomedical Library expressed interest in investigating EZProxy as a proxy solution for their restricted resources. Jody, Flo and Dale have worked this month with Annette Williams, Nunzia Guise and Jerry Chaung to investigate options. We have ultimately decided that LTT will provide EZProxy services for EBL. This solution will be implemented in April.

SEARCH FOR CSA III

Jody also spent more time this month interviewing applicants for LTT's open position. We completed our final (3 hour) interviews with our four top candidates in March.

DECISION TO POSTPONE IMPLEMENTATION OF NETWORK OPERATING SYSTEM UPGRADE

As mentioned above, the hardware upgrade for LIBRARY7 was delayed until early March. This necessary delay placed an extra burden on the upgrade process, which requires several steps and, in some cases, waiting a day between steps. Ultimately, we determined that we did not have the necessary time to effect the NOS upgrade safely over Spring Break. We are hopeful that we can begin the server-side work within a few months (if not sooner).

COMPLETION OF ANNUAL STAFF PERFORMANCE REVIEWS/TIME-COST STUDY

Along with all other team leaders, Jody completed the supervisor's documentation and staff interviews (9 sets) relating to the annual performance review process. He also participated in the Time-Cost Study survey.

NETWORK ADMINISTRATION

Jody continues to perform routine network management tasks. This includes Netware network account maintenance, email account maintenance, tape backups, and troubleshooting various network and application problems (typically reported through netfix). He also manages some aspects of the web environment, including rotating web logs for each of the servers near the beginning of each month.

FOURTH ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM ON ELECTRONIC THESES AND DISSERTATIONS

The Fourth Annual Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations was held the third week of March at CalTech in Pasadena, CA. Jody has been project leader of Vanderbilt' Pilot Project and attended this symposium in that capacity. See ETD-2001 for details. It was entirely coincidental that during the month we received four requests from graduate students wanting to investigate their options for publishing an ETD. Of the four calls, one has resulted in the student uploading her ETD which is now going through the approval process. Jody worked with the student, Anthea Butler of the Graduate Department of Religion, to get the formatting changes implemented for an ETD.

MEETINGS

• ITSL: Jody continues to meet the first Thursday of the month with the Information Technology School Leaders group on campus. This month they also held an extra meeting to discuss recommendations for innovative uses of technology at Vanderbilt.
• Campus EMail-Client Task Force: Jody is working with a group chaired by Bill Longwell to recommend an email client that will be provided for students and faculty as VUMail migrates away from the Simeon client.
• Video-on-Demand: ITS held two meetings this month relating to the Internet 2 project and campus needs and facilities for providing streaming video over the network. Work on a survey of needs and facilities across campus has begun.
• Jody continues to meet with the VU Stake Holders group each Thursday.
• Jody continues to lead the monthly Technology Support Coordinator meeting. This month's meeting concerned principally discussions of the plans to upgrade the network operating system over Spring Break. (see TSC Minutes).
• Jody met with the RS Management team at is regular meeting this month.
• Jody met with Brent Mai and Flo to begin discussions of workstation replacement needs for the Walker Library.
• Jody met with Library Management Council on the 5th and 26th this month.

UPDATED SILVERPLATTER ERL DATABASES--24

• ATLA - 1/2001
• Index to Legal Periodicals - 1/2001
• PAIS - 1/2001
• Education Abstracts - 1/2001
• Applied Science & Technology Abstracts - 1/2001
• Education Index - 1/2001
• EconLit - 2/2001
• PsycINFO 1/2001
• Book Review Digest - 1/2001
• Art Abstracts - 1/2001
• ERIC - 12/2001
• PsycINFO Weekly - 2/2001:week1,2,3,4; 3/2001:week 1,2,3
• General Science Abstracts - 1/2001
• MLA - 2/2001
• MLA Directory of Periodicals - 2/2001
• SilverLinker - 3/2001: week 1,2,3

ADDED LINKS TO WEB-BASED DATABASES: 4 New

• Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance -new
• Congressional Quarterly Researcher - new
• Congressional Quarterly Weekly - new
• Sports Business Research Network - new

UPDATED LINKS TO WEB-BASED DATABASES: 3 Updates

• The Civil War: A Newspaper Perspective - update
• Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians - update
• Artbibliographies Modern - update

ADDED LINKS TO TRIAL DATABASE PAGE:1 new, 1 Upgrade

• Columbia Gazetteer of the World - new
• TENN-SHARE - update

NETWARE BASED CDROM UPGRADES: 6 upgrades

MANAGEMENT LIBRARY:

• Business Dateline - March 2001
• Economic Literature Database - 2001
• Financial Accounting Research Database - November 2001
• Worked with FIS Online after reports of database not loading. Solution: clear cache in browser.
  
  
  CENTRAL LIBRARY:

• Social Sciences Citation Index - upgrade
  
• USATrade - upgrade
• Crime 1999 - upgrade
  

ADDITIONAL:

DIVINITY:
Re-ghosted public workstations were installed with Index Islamicus and re-structed Logos Library
Arranged for trial disc of new Full Text ATLA to shipped as soon as available from SilverPlatter

CENTRAL:
Re-installed International Financial Statistics on all public workstations
Worked with World Development Indicators after reports of database not working. Solution: obviously tied into Library 7 upgrade. Product was in fact working.
Re-installed Cataloger's Desktop for Ann Ercelawn
Arranged for trial disc of Bibliography of Art to be shipped as soon as available from SilverPlatter

INTERLIBRARY LOAN:
Worked with patron mistakenly sending ILL forms en masse via WebSPIRS form
Made additions to the OCLC FirstSearch ILL submission form

ENDNOTE:
Revised the PsycINFO Connection Files template and search attributes template to sync with the WebSPIRS record.
Showed user how to copy formatted records in word processor and mail program.

GENERATE STATISTICS:
Ran ERL monthly stats reports
Ran Xenu monthly broken link reports
Ran WebTrends PublicWeb, StaffWeb and AcqWeb reports

CDROM TOTALS:
ERL Upgrades - 24
Novell Upgrades - 6
Web - Research Databases - updates - 3; new - 4
Web - Trial Databases - updates - 1; new - 1

ACORN CIRCULATION AND SERIALS SUPPORT

• Created item types, locations, holdings codes, circulation rules, loan periods, and circulation maps for VU-CENTER libraries.
• Created new location and corresponding holding code for Science.
• Created test data and policies for training for VU-CENTER staff.
• Completed request to have all internal-use profiles set not to increment charges.
• Created overrides for Management and Education staff.
• Created user profiles and access policies for Divinity staff.
• Used sel tools to extract Divinity serial control records with missing vendor data.
• Used sel and edit tools to move Biomedical items from a non-shadowed to shadowed location.
• Assisted staff at Science with location shifting project.
• Initiated re-programming project with Sirsi for the Intermec Hand-held Scanners.
• Provided troubleshooting support for regularly scheduled reports for Central and Science.
• Converted periodical use report for Education.

OTHER ACTIVITIES

• Participated in the LTT team retreat at the beginning of the month.
• Completed annual self-review process.
• Worked with Dale and Nancy on testing the new backup server, Acorn3.
• Communicated with workgroups to establish consensus on Unicorn 2000 upgrade date (Weekend of May 26-27).
• Began studying Unicorn API manual.
• Attended team and tech support coordinator meetings as scheduled.
• Completed the functional portion of Access database for Divinity and used sel tools to perform retrospective data extraction and import for records already processed.
  

WORKSTATION UPGRADES/RE-CLONING

The network technicians replaced 16 workstations in March, in Central, Special Collections and Annex. Five remain to be replaced, one in Special Collections, and four machines devoted to specific purposes with unitique software and hardware configurations. All public workstations in Divinity were freshly ghosted, and Centurion Guard hardware and software installed, which is designed to preserve the integrity of the original configuration by deleting all changes made to files and system upon reboot of the workstation.

MEETINGS

Mike's meetings in March included the LTT retreat, the Faculty-Staff Campaign Kickoff, the Library Staff Forum Task Force, the Technology Support Coordinators, and a joint meeting with the Staff Developing Coordinating Committee and the Technology Training Coordinators. Mike accompanied Susan to meet with representatives from Education to discuss possible development of a utility to track reference desk statistics online. He also met with a candidate for the Information Services Librarian position at Management.

WORKSTATION APPLICATION SOFTWARE

Mike met with Sue Davis to discuss implementation of a beta version of a software package called Climate Notebook. The software is designed to analyze data collected from climate condition sensors which have been installed at the Annex and the . Mike began initial testing for the current version, beta 2.3. A new beta version is due out in early April.

OTHER PROJECTS

Other projects for Mike in March involved refining the command scripts used to automatically replace wallpaper and delete temporary internet
files on the Central and Management public workstations, and experiments with converting MS Word documents to html using various combinations of program versions and utilities in Word 97, Word 2000, Dreamweaver 3, and Dreamweaver 4. Investigation continued into problems switching between
wired and wireless connections using the S/E laptop.

Judy

WORKSTATION UPGRADES/RE-CLONING

• -deploying a total of 10 staff workstations in Central Reference, Central Circulation, Special Collections and at the Annex and
  updating inventory to reflect changes.
• -ghosting 3 problematic workstations.

WORKSTATION APPLICATION SOFTWARE

• -loading various software on staff workstations, including Peoplesoft for Mary Ellen Wilson and Pat Johnson.

ADDITIONAL

• -spending sometime writing her annual review and meeting with Jody regarding same.
• -attending the LTT retreat atScarritt-Bennett Library.
• -sitting in on interviews for 2 CSA III candidates.
• -entering problems/requests or making changes to PTS, the Sirsi database, reference hours and postmaster.
  

Chuck

• - workstation deployments: 4 staff.
• - hardware issues resolved: 13 (examples: card reader, bar code reader, monitor, SCSI card, power supply, general troubleshooting).
• - software installations and problems resolved: 9 (examples: IP conflict, printing configuration, web browser configuration, various error messages).
• - ghost processes: approximately 25.
• - worked with tape backup procedures.
• - updates to inventory data base and web pages.
• - IP table edits.
• - phone coverage: approximately 31.5 hours.
  

Isabelle Crist

PHOTO ARCHIVES PROJECT:

ADDITIONAL

Last updated April 9, 2001