Some of the projects and issues addressed by the Library Technology Team during February included:

• Accelerated work on project to replace BFAS.
• Began preparations for upgrading network operating system upgrade, first major step requires replacement of LIBRARY7 hardware platform.
• Worked with Mary Ellen Wilson to do planned cleanup of EBSCO invoice load.
• Developed temporary solution to problem with ADUTEXT process.
• Corrected some problems with the Baudelaire database.
• Continued refining configuration for KUDZU as member libraries provide information.
• Began consultation of Eskind Biomedical Library concerning possible implementation of EZProxy for their restricted titles.
• Moved two web forms to secure server.
• Created a list of Honduras and Guatemalan titles to be imported into access
• Researching the changes in the new version of ezproxy.
• Reviewed "pre-release" versions of LTT's new web pages with TSC and started revisions based on suggestions from this group.
• Updated hardware inventory database and tcp/ip address assignments.
• Completed scanning and skeletal record creation for section batch of items from Special Collections Photo Archives.
• Began work on arranging work space for Photo Archives project in room 201a of Special Collections.
• Installed DVD-ROM drive for use at Central Government Information public workstation.
• Replaced 9 Workstations. (see planning document).
• Added or changed 16 URL's for web-based database products.
• Updated 14 existing cdrom-based products.
• Worked on Sigaux Web Exhibit.
• Made several Acorn user and format policy changes.
• Responded to several brief service outages (see Server Problem Log for details).
• Continued early production/late planning of Special Collections Photographic Archive Project, digitized nearly 90 additional photos.
• 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.

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

• See Server Problem Log for details.

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

• 49 viruses were intercepted by the Micro Trend Interscan VirusWall email scanner during February.
• We advised a manual, unscheduled upgrade to the workstation antivirus software in mid-month to protect against the VBS-Kalamar.

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

Our team completed planning for a half-day annual review retreat as part of our annual review process to be held on March 2. Nancy, Anne and Dale have been in charge of planning and leading the event.

Most team members attended a session demonstrating the newest version of ERes software.

Jody Combs began work with Information Technology School Leaders in February. He also attended his first LMC meetings as a member.

Mike Martin attended the Adobe "Total Inspiration" Seminar held at the Renaissance Nashville Hotel.

Chuck Owen attended his annual reserves duty.

All team members attended a demonstration given by Chuck Owen on the function of and procedures for installing Centurion Guard hardware for public workstations.

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

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

ANNUAL EVALUATION

Compiled last year's activities
Formulated evaluation
created online CV

SEARCH COMMITTEE FOR CSAIII

Met with several candidates
Discussed candidates with Search Committee members

ACORN TASK FORCE

Became chair of group
Prepared set of resource links

BAUDELAIRE/SIGAUX WEB EXHIBIT

Continued to work with Isabelle to pull together a webpage/slide
show
Consulted with Yvonne to set direction for online exhibit of
Baudelaire materials

TRAINING COORDINATORS

Met to review proposal for training
submitted draft of proposal to SDCC

ADDITIONAL

Additional activities included, Presentation of an XML Brown Bag,
Meeting wtih the web task force, created survey for Team retreat,
attended team retreat, worked with Dale to create method for
automatically updating XML file.

Nancy

ACORN

• Early English Poetry records - completed this project of adding the 506, 530 and 856 URL for Early English Books Online to the records we had for these on microfilm.
• RS Holdings Codes tables - completed this project of creating webpages for RS staff to use in determining correct holdings codes and spine labels to use for RS processed materials. In the process, she had to create some new holdings codes for Management, Central, Science and Divinity items housed in the Annex.
• NetLibrary records - made progress with this project by retrieving a test file of records, editing them for several changes we needed for our catalog and creating the bibload report that will be used to load the records into Acorn.
• Created a report for Sue Davis showing the number of Helguera items that had been processed through the Bindery and through Book Repair.
• UniToLars - succeeded in loading the necessary software into Acorntest and setting up an Acorntest login for this to be tested by Bindery staff.
• Ran a report to list all of the OBSV-PER orders for RS Order Services.
• made some Acorn policy changes to the fields and labels for the VM format to be consistent with other record formats in Acorn,
• created several new Acorn user ID's and modified others as well as deleted a few.
• edited the policy for the 776 field so that some notes in that field do not display to the public.
• created a new vendor Group3 category PSUPDATE to be used for vendor records that have been updated for PeopleSoft in preparation for the switch from using BFAS to using Acorn for fund accounting and check creation.
• Nancy worked with Sirsi to correct a problem with a serial record that was being shadowed at the title level incorrectly. Sirsi provided a fix for that particular record that Nancy implemented to resolve the problem.

ADDITIONAL

• Nancy completed her performance self-review,
• attended CAAG (where she took minutes) and RSIG meetings,
• attended a meeting to work on details of the NetLibrary project, and
• worked with Dale and Anne to plan the LTT retreat scheduled for Mar. 2.
  

Dale

BFAS ELIMINATION PROJECT

The BFAS (http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/bfas/) project team kicked into high gear with plans on eliminating BFAS during the late
spring. Dale spent a great deal of time determining how to extract the needed information and to get it into the proper format.

AUTOMATED LOADING OF EBSCO INVOICE

Dale also worked with Mary Ellen to cleanup after the EBSCO invoice load. This cleanup involved determining which invoices where not created because of outdated order numbers or changed funds.

ACORN ADUTEXT PROBLEM

Nancy, Anne, Suellen, Jody and Dale also investigated a minor problem with Acorn that caused ADUTEXT to fail a couple of days. A temporary solution was put into place until we can reindex the database.

BAUDELAIRE

Other non-Acorn related activities included making a couple of changes to the Baudelaire database to allow sending records to users easier.

KUDZU

Dale also made, and continues to make, several additional changes to KUDZU as member libraries identify changes that need to be made or that would enhance the service.

ADDITIONAL

• Meeting with ITS and Biomedical Library staff to discuss the elimination of VUProxy and possible use of ezproxy to meet the needs of Biomedical users.
• Moving two non-secure forms to a secure web server
• Creating a list of Honduras and Guatemalan titles to be imported into access Researching the changes in the new version of ezproxy

Jody

DEVELOPMENT OF SPECIAL COLLECTION PHOTO ARCHIVE DIGITIZATION PROJECT:

Again, a considerable portion of time this month was spent working on details associated with this project. Jody held several meetings with Juanita Murray, Marshall Breeding, Isabelle Crist, John Haar, Strawberry Luck, Sara Harwell, Sue Davis, Lynn Cradick and Judy Orr (of Creative Services) to resolve issues and develop plans associated with scope, equipment, budget requests and workflow. At this point, the project is still early production stages. Some significant milestones: we are nearing completion of setting up a location where we will be performing the scanning work. This is room 201a in the Special Collections library. We are ready to purchase a slide-scanner to be used to digitize the nearly 70,000 slides associated with the archives, as well as for use with newly donated slides.

SEARCH FOR CSA III

Jody also spent more time this month interviewing and applicants for LTT's open position. We completed 6 second-round one hour interviews and have narrowed our pool to three viable candidates and should complete final (3 hour) interviews with these three by mid-March. We should be able to fill the position by end of March.

BEGIN IMPLEMENTATION OF NETWORK OPERATING SYSTEM UPGRADE

As mentioned last month, we have been studying ways to safely and transparently upgrade our network operation system. This month we were able to negotiate schedules for the hardware upgrade of LIBRARY7, a crucial step in the process we have developed. The hardware upgrade was delayed until the weekend before Spring Break, due to the business of this season for the public workstations in the affected libraries (Central and Science & Engineering). This necessary delay places a extra burden on the upgrade process, which requires several steps and, in some cases, waiting a day between steps, meaning that we may not be able to complete all steps in the process by the end of Spring Break. However, we are hopeful that we can get most, if not all, of the server-side work done, leaving only the client upgrade to a later time.

PARTICIPATION IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SCHOOL LEADERS GROUP (ITSL)

This month Jody began working with the Information Technology Support Leaders (ITSL) on campus. This is composed of technology support leaders for each of the schools, VIPPS, and, now, the Library. As one of his first duties with the group he developed a document describing the Library's technology and technology support infrastructure.

MEETINGS

Jody continues to meet with the VU Stake Holders group. Among the topics discussed this month, were plans for the "transitional environment" for moving to the "e-password" and plans related to phasing out use of VUProxy. This month's Technology Support Coordinator meeting concerned principally discussions of the plans to upgrade the network operating system over Spring Break. (see TSC Minutes).

• Philosopher's Index - 12/2000
• EconLit - 1/2001
• Education Abstracts - 12/2000
• Education Index - 12/2000
• PsycINFO - 12/2000
• MLA - 1/2001
• Art Abstracts - 12/2000
• SilverLinker 1/31/2001, 2/8/2001
• Life Sciences Collection - 12/2000
• Applied Science & Technology Abstracts - 12/2000
• Zoological Record - 2000
• Index to Legal Periodicals - 12/2000
• General Science Abstracts - 12/2000
• Water Resources Abstracts - 1/2001
  

• Middle English Compendium
• New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
• Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians-cross-reference to the new Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
• SciFinder
• Crossfire Beilstein & Gmelin
• The Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Total: 6

• Jake
• JSTOR
• eHRAF Ethnography
• eHRAF Archaeology
• Total: 5

ADDED LINKS TO TRIAL DATABASE PAGE:

• Political Science and Government Abstracts
• Art Bibliographies Modern
• She worked with CSA to establish a link to holdings for the above databases.
• DigiScript
• Yearbook of International Organizations
• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Total: 5

ADDITIONAL:

• worked with Bell & Howell on the Chadwyck-Healy database International Index to Music Periodicals on what appeared to be an access problem but was in reality a licensing limitation.
• worked with CIS on the library's inability to access Congressional Universe. They had deleted our IP range for the third time. It took numerous phone calls and three days before we regained access.
• ran monthly statistics for ERL and WebTrends for the StaffWeb, PublicWeb and AcqWeb. She also ran the broken link reports.
• installed the 2000/4 upgrade to Cataloger's Desktop and Classification Plus for the catalogers.
• worked with two faculty members to reconfigure their browsers to allow access to WebSPIRS via the proxy and a member of the Psychology department a PsycINFO display problem.

Monthly Report not available at this time.

The network technicians installed nine workstations in February, in ILL, Central, and Music. Seventeen remain to be installed, mostly in Central, Gov't Docs, and the Annex. Some of these replace workstations which have unique configurations, with different operating systems and software packages, and consequently will require a bit more time and care to replace.
Several OptiPlex GXa's in various locations were upgraded to 64 MB of RAM.

DVD-ROM FOR GOVERNMENT DOCS

Mike installed a DVD-ROM drive for public use on a workstation at Government Documents. New Census Data is the first of what is expected to be an increasing number of databases which are being distrubuted on DVD rather than CD.

MEETINGS

Mike met with the Library Staff Forum Task Force, and met with several candidates for open librarian positions at Management. Mike also attended a session demonstrating the newest version of ERes software, and the Adobe Total Inspiration Seminar held at the Renaissance Nashville Hotel.

Judy continues to stay busy with routine help desk duties in January, in addition:

WORKSTATION DEPLOYMENTS

Judy ghosted and installed workstations for Balthrop, Pilley, WilsonA,ILLSTU3, ILLSTU2, ILLSTU, CENBIBST1and assisted Mike with attempting to replace the Ariel workstation. The Ariel software wouldn't talk to the scanner. We tried several different approaches of installing and uninstalling software and drivers. After several hours of trying, we decided to put back the old workstation and rethink the problem.

VARIOUS ACTIVITIES

Judy installed DW4 for Harrington, Sappenfield, Erickson, Porter, Stringer-Hye, and the Reference workstation at Science. She added
more RAM to Carole Partain's machine to help with poor performance. Intellimouse software was installed for Brian Standish and Scicirc1. She deleted and rebuilt Suzanne Bell's profile to solve a problem with IE not launching from within Pegasus. Judy took minutes for the February TSC meeting and posted them to the staffweb. She and Mike ghosted NECBIND to solve a BSOD problem. She ghosted, new staff member, Angel Brunner's workstation. She also covered the phone for several extra hours this month; Chuck was out for a couple of weeks. Judy assisted Jody with the virus scan upgrade brought on by the VBS-Kalamar.A virus/worm by visiting workstations to update the virus scan software.

HELP DESK DUTY

Judy solved 46 netfix request, most of which were edits to distribution lists and web pages. And she entered 232 problems in the Problem Tracking System.

During February 2001, Chuck Owen was away from the office for two full weeks. These are some of the highlights of his activities during the month:

• participated in interviews of CSA III candidates.
• hardware issues resolved: 6 (examples: card reader, monitor, SCSI card, power supply, general troubleshooting).
• worked with tape backup procedures.
• workstation deployments: 2 staff.
• ghost processes: 7.
• updates to inventory data base and web pages.
• IP table edits.
• phone coverage: approximately 10.5 hours.
• software installations and problems resolved: 8.
• processed orders for PC components on 3 occasions.
• other: gave presentation to LTT on Centurion device installation.
  

Isabelle Crist

PHOTO ARCHIVES PROJECT:

• Complete scanning and entering of records for 2nd batch of photographs.
• Research user feedback for Nikon Super Coolscans.
• Draw up list of things that need to be done to the Special Coll. space (new cables, phone line, furniture
  removed, furniture added, etc.).
• Meet with various PAP team members todiscuss and work on different aspects of the project.

ADDITIONAL

• Complete and turn in Self-Evaluation.
• Work on Sigaux web exhibit.
• Attend LTT, TSC, and PAP meetings.

Last updated Mar. 7, 2001