Resource Services
Monthly Highlights

May 2001

Technical Services Monthly Report
Library Information Technology Services Monthly Report

Technical Services

Division Wide Activities:

On May 4, and right on schedule, the Acorn/PeopleSoft interface was successfully implemented. A big thanks goes out to the entire Project Team, and especially to Dale Poulter, whose mantra should be “The problem has been resolved.” Dale, Pat Johnson, Mary Ellen Wilson, and Roberta Winjum continue to monitor output from the interface and make small changes in processing as needed. A celebration on May 23 was held for the Project Team and included our Executive Sponsors, Nim Chinniah, Betty Price, Kim Howard, Kevin Walker, and Flo Wilson.

Team members in Cataloging and Authorities, Order Services, and Preservation participated in testing Unicorn 2000, which was released to live production at the end of the month. In the Cataloging and Authorities Team, Mary Charles Lasater, Yuh-Fen Benda, Pete Wilson, and Zora Breeding helped with testing the software. Zora, as chair of CAAG, compiled and distributed notes on changes to expect. This list is posted on the CAAG web page (thanks to Ann Ercelawn). Sue Davis and Zora met with Anne Laws to learn about the change to the In-Transit process. Mary Ellen Wilson, Monica Sanchez, and Chris Waldrop also did their part in testing and documenting changes to acquisitions. The upgrade went smoothly and team members are working through the changes, which have been relatively minor.

An additional file of 2,960 NetLibrary records was loaded into Acorn. A corrected file of the first 10,973 NetLibrary records will be resent to Marcive and re-loaded due to missing headings. Mary Charles Lasater is cleaning up problems with unauthorized headings on the new records, with help from Laurie Power. We are heartened to know that even with their errors, the mere existence of the records in the OPAC has greatly increased the use of these e- books.

Personnel:

Vanderbilt students Maureen Conklin and Kevin Zeman were hired to help with the Annex summer stacks shifting projects.

Peg Earheart attended a small group presentation at Information Technology Services given by SmartForce, a company that offers over 500 web-based tutorials. Information gathered at this presentation has been shared with the Network Training Co-ordinators. We anticipate gleaning more precise information to share in the forthcoming months.

Peg also met with Al Stewart, Central Business Group; and accompanied him for a "behind-the-scenes" tour of the Country Museum Hall of Fame on the day prior to its Grand Opening.

Ann Ercelawn, Mary Charles Lasater, and Mary Ellen Wilson attended the UUGI meeting in Huntsville. Mary Charles presented a very well attended workshop on using a vendor for authority support.

Ann Ercelawn attended the NASIG annual meeting in San Antonio and conducted a Basic Serials Cataloging workshop for MINITEX in Minneapolis.

Sue Davis, Jean Wright, and Roberta Winjum attended the Information Alliance meeting in Kentucky. Roberta led a discussion group on Changing Roles of Technical Services Staff. Jean Wright and Larry Romans met with six cohorts from UTK and the University of Kentucky who are involved with various aspects of government documents to discuss possible ways in which to cooperate.

Rich Murray has accepted an appointment to serve as co-chair of the Resume Reviewing Service Committee of the New Members Round Table of ALA for 2001-2002.

Don Jones attended several meetings in connection with the Faculty Staff Campaign.

Sue Davis and Rich Murray served as survey ambassadors for the campus staff satisfaction survey.

Pete Wilson has agreed to be a panelist on the next Library Forum on library strategic planning.

Norma Riddick said goodbye to the library for the summer.

Ibtisam Latif was out for much of the month, on what sounds like a lovely tour of Europe.

Rita Breen has been out on leave since May 30, and will be out approximately two weeks.

Karen Coles gave birth to Rebecca a bit earlier than expected, but is doing fine. Meanwhile, Dewanda Lee has accepted Karen's position and is learning the ropes.

Binding/Marking benefited briefly from the help of a Divinity student, Susanna. She is now gone and has been replaced by Lesley Grantham.

Student assistant Yong Chen joined book repair for a second summer, as Daphne Walker took a three-month leave over the summer.

Library Annex:

Circulation:
162 patrons requested Annex materials via the Web. 611 items circulated to campus libraries. 36 patrons requested 423 pages of photocopies.

Storage:
75 linear feet of new Annex transfers were received. The Z shift has been completed. The "not on Acorn" stacks are being compressed; we anticipate gaining nearly 1 full range from this compression. The History stacks are being shifted; and we soon hope to have completed the Sigaux duplicate range.

RS Maintenance:
2,894 Acorn records were edited. 4 Central titles were re-instated. 2,048 withdrawals were processed. Of these withdrawals, 1,914 were for the Education Library. 68 intra-library transfers were processed for the campus libraries collections.

Visitors:
45 visitors were on site. These included A & S faculty, Law faculty, Law School Research Assistants and Music faculty. Representatives of Central, I.T.S., Management Information Systems, Office of the University Librarian, Preventive Medicine, Special Collections, Student Accounts, and the VU Theatre Department were also on-site.

Meetings:
Peg met with Stan Thompson from Estimating and Design regarding facility request estimates; and with various VU service representatives regarding the HVAC system.

Cataloging and Authorities:

Except for an increase in the amount of serial maintenance, the end-of-year ordering activities caused a noticeable decrease in the flow of new materials to cataloging. The team used the respite to work on several other projects.

Yuh-Fen Benda, Ann Barnette and Jeff Taylor finished analyzing the Publications of the Scottish Historical Society – in plenty of time for the fall semester! Jeff also worked on Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections and the Bulletin of the US National Museum. With the help of several staff, progress is being made on the split file report, work that had been suspended for the duration of the Helguera project. Mary Charles Lasater and Yuh-Fen Benda continue to make progress on Pinyin conversion. Mary Charles finished the changes to the Arts subject headings. Rich Murray was able to devote quite a bit of time to cataloging materials from the inventory. He also made extensive changes to the Subject Guide. Ann Ercelawn worked on ProQuest, Project Muse and Wiley e-journal titles. Don Jones worked on Sigaux titles sent over by Linda Davis. Pete Wilson worked on Sevier serials. Norma Riddick finished the Sam Fleming gift monographs. Yuh- Fen finished posting documentation for the BFAS/Peoplesoft project. Mary Charles worked with other team members to prepare the Music backlog for outsourcing. Denise Chavez created a spreadsheet to use for inventorying and the materials have been sent to Music to be inventoried.

Toward the end of the month, the team discussed subject reassignments. Very few permanent changes were made, but summer reassignments were finalized. Permanent changes: Rich will take on primary responsibility for 3410 Baudelaire materials. Mary Charles will be the primary liaison for Music at least through the summer. Susan Bell will be the sole liaison for the 90 Central General fund and Mary Charles for 96 Central Reference fund. Summer reassignments: Zora will tackle Classics and History materials in German. Rich and Susan will handle the remaining History materials.

Order Services:

Order Services remains busy this month preparing for the end of the fiscal year. The verifiers are working hard to process order requests before yearend, while at the same time keeping Blackwell approvals up to date. Our vendors are also blessing us with prompt turn-around on these orders, so that the mailroom is filling up with shipments of books waiting to be received.

Serials:
Serials are continuing to move along nicely. Nothing can stay on the shelves very long. In fact they're moving so quickly that Gina Berry was able to devote some time to assisting with collection manager ordering.

Chris Waldrop is working on a list of standing orders (continuations and serials) that did not have serial control records. Many haven't had any activity in years. About one-fourth of the ones checked so far (which is only a very small amount) have turned out to be titles that had ceased or were complete but, for some reason, still had active orders. Cleaning up these will reduce the number of orders presently clogging up the system.

Monographs:
The oldest firm orders awaiting receipt were received in the mailroom in the past 3-4 weeks. All Blackwell and YBP approvals are current. Invoices for all foreign approvals have been prepaid, as instructed by the library.

This completes our first full month in the absence of BFAS, and we find that invoice payment is proceeding smoothly.

Sherry Huffer, freed from BFAS responsibilities, is assisting with orders in Rita Breen’s absence, as well as helping to receive some firm orders and approving invoices for payment.

Preservation:

The team continues to be very busy with fallout from the end-of- semester returns and new materials surges. Student and temporary assistants in both team locations are helping.

Sue Davis is very happy to announce that the first 2 months of data have been successfully uploaded from the Special Collections vault and Annex 2nd floor PEM dataloggers, imported into the Climate Notebook software, and emailed to the Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Mike Martin was instrumental in making all this possible.

Binding:
1,738 items were sent to Heckman Bindery in May. This total includes 703 new monographs, 101 monograph rebinds, 797 periodicals, and 137 serials. The team has begun to notice a typical increase in quality control problems as temporary summer help begins work at Heckman.

Monograph and periodical binding invoices are current on Acorn. Serial binding invoices are current with the end of March shipments, and Karen Pillow is working to bring them up to date.

The team updated 394 Acorn records as a result of binding. There is a small backlog of holdings updates, partially due to a CURRENT LOCATION bug in Unicorn 2000 and partially due to larger binding shipments.

Machelle Keen selected 568 items for binding of the total 1080 Central paperbacks that came through processing. The binding rate is 52%.

Marking:
As of May 31, staff labeled 4,270 books, 118 RUSH items, and 239 unbound serials. 250 fiche envelopes were stamped. Processing of Central Leisure Reading volumes was current.

Repair:
212 volumes received 276 treatments. Charlotte Lew and Daphne Walker focused on completing the backlog of Special Collections special housing items. The emphasis over the summer will be on spine repairs, most of which are Central items.

Library Information Technology Services

A brief summary of how LITS staff spent its efforts in May follows:

UPGRADES and NEW SERVICES:

LITS was involved with an unusually large number of upgrades this month.

Over the weekend of May 26th, we upgraded the version of SIRSI Unicorn used by Acorn from 99.4 to Unicorn 2000. This was the first time we were able to perform a server side upgrade with essentially no down time to our users. We accomplished this by using our backup server (Acorn3) to provide basic functions during the time that the production server was being upgraded. As is usually the case, we were able to automate the related Workflows client upgrade for most library staff through the use of scripts and Novell's NAL facility. Due to the work of the library's workgroups and LITS staff, along with the cooperation and help of all library staff, the upgrade went very smoothly. We are still working on several problems with this release and hope to have the more serious of these resolved shortly.

During the same weekend, LITS staff also upgraded all Novell 4.11 Intranetware servers with the latest support pack (SP9). This was done for all servers, except for LIBRARY5 (the Annex server), during off-hours so users of these servers did not experience any down-time. These upgrades are an important step in our strategy toward upgrading the Network Operating System to version 5.1 (the current production release). This, in turn, will allow us to upgrade our web-server software and implement several new services, such as streaming media services. The upgrade went generally quite smoothly with the exception of the Annex. We were unable to move the upgrade files over the T1 connection to the Annex, so had to schedule time during normal work hours to take the files to the site for the upgrade. This was done on Friday, June 1.

On Wednesday morning, May 23, LITS staff worked with ITS networking staff to move all workstations and the Library's ERES server to the gigabit backbone. Walker Library had been moved to the new backbone earlier in the month. ITS's project to implement a new gigabit backbone has been proceeding at a good pace and, when complete, should result in improved network performance over the existing ATM backbone. Baker staff immediately noticed a significant improvement, even though optimal performance will not be achieved until the project is completed toward the end of this year. During the last week of May, we moved another of our NT servers (LIBRARY10-dbTextworks) to the gigabit backbone. We encountered some initial problems with this move, but were able to eventually isolate and resolve them. The next steps for the Library are to move our ATM attached servers to the gigabit backbone and then proceed to convert the GLB. We are unique on campus in having servers directly attached to the ATM backbone (at Baker, the GLB, and at the Network Operations room at the Hill Center). This makes migration to the gigabit backbone a little more challenging.

Under the heading of new services, LITS staff have been working with Divinity Library staff and the Library Technology Officer on a project to digitize 500 slides and make them available over the web as part of the larger American Religion Electronic Library project. We elected to be involved with this project to also further develop our infrastructure, expertise with digitizing technologies, and with database-driven web development. This project, which is nearly complete, used some of the new equipment purchased to support similar efforts for the libraries, beginning with the Photo Archives of the Special Collections Library. The equipment, a Macintosh G4 with dual 533MHz processors and a Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED slide scanner with a batch feeder attachment, will be moved to the Special Collections Library shortly to begin work with Special Collections staff.

WORK TOWARD UPCOMING UPGRADES:

This month we also spent a significant amount of time working on upgrades coming this summer.

Heard Library has agreed to host KUDZU. Associated with this plan, we began research on purchasing a new SUN server for this service. Having recently purchased a SUN 450 to serve as our Acorn backup server, we initially felt that this would be a good platform for the KUDZU server as well. However, in the latter part of the month we became aware of a promotional offer provided by SUN which involved the SUN 420R platform. This platform is, in some respects, better for our purposes than the 450. In addition, the promotion provided that we would be able to get a second server free with the purchase. After some concentrated time researching, consulting, and discussing the issues, we decided to purchase the 420R which should arrive in the next month.

The second 420R provided through SUN's promotional discount allows us to think seriously about replacing the hardware platform for ACORN. Acorn currently runs on a SUN Enterprise 5000, originally purchased in 1997. This hardware has performed quite well for us but is showing some signs of aging and does not perform as well as newer platforms. We are currently doing detailed research and consulting with SIRSI and SUN about the feasibility of using the 420R as the hardware platform for Acorn. At this point, all indications have been positive. We will, of course, provide a great deal more information as we proceed.

It has also become clear in the past several months that Acorn needs more disk storage space. We are currently running at between 85% and 95% of available space on the Enterprise 5000 (at one point during the upgrade we were at a "white-knuckle" 97%). We have purchased two D1000 external storage units to address this need. These will provide an additional 72 GB of mirrored storage for Acorn. At this time, we are discussing whether to add this directly to the 5000 or to the new 420R when it is delivered.

We have also purchased three new Dell 4400 PowerEdge servers. One of these will become the new dbTextworks server, providing faster and more robust database operations for our web environment. A second will be used to replace the Library's ERES server. Currently, ERES runs on one of the last of our old Zenith servers. The third will be used to roll down a replacement for LIBRARY5 (the Annex server) which is the second of our last two Zenith servers (a 486 based unit that has done its duty well!).

In addition to servers, we will also be starting a new round of workstation upgrades this summer. We have purchased 20 new Dell GX400's for the Walker Library. We have also placed orders for 3 more to be used in Central's InterLibrary Loan department, one of which is for the new Copyright Permissions officer, Jim Webb. We will be purchasing several more before the end of June. Once these are installed, we will be purchasing another batch in July and August. Included among the notable features of the new workstations is that they are based on the Pentium 4 processor chip and have a front-side bus speed of 400 MHz. In some cases, they will also include DVD-ROM drives, instead of CD-ROM, as more and more information is released on the higher capacity DVD's.

Turning to the OS and software application arena:

We have been starting work on testing the beta release of WebSPIRS and ERL version 5. Beta testing should be complete in June and a production release should become available in July or August.

We have started working with the ZENWorks server side components that will, when completed, allow us to deploy a new Netware client to workstations. This, in turn, will allow us to run newer workstation operating systems (such as Windows 2000 or Windows XP) and provide a new range of workstation support services for our users.

We, in collaboration with other library staff, are also starting to look toward improvements to the Acorn web interface and are implementing usability studies of the existing web interfaces.

A FEW FINAL NOTES:

I wanted to get this "summary report" out in email format as soon as possible. I've adopted this format in the hopes that it would be more useful to those who prefer a broader brush than our more detailed reports have offered. Let me know if you find this type of format more helpful. A more detailed monthly report for LITS, including individual staff reports, will be available by the end of the first week of June at:

http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/libtech/reports/2001May-MR.html

LITS's new web pages are up! See:

http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/libtech/

It's going to be a busy and exciting summer!