WML Tech Updates

The Technology & Training Support Coordinators met again today. We had a full room - 20 people! And there was a full agenda! So this post is rather long, but bear with me!

1) Update on AlphaSearch plan for year 2 (Primo) -It’s now being reviewed by the library. Please let them know just how rapidly evolving the product is. It’s constantly being updated and problems are being addressed and resolved as quickly as possible. The Digital Library Steering Committee is doing formal acceptance testing for the licensing in the Spring. There will be a “soft launch” (and possibly a version 2) for the public and other libraries to play with, also in Spring. Anticipated full roll-out of the production version is Fall 2008.

2) Discussion of replacement for VUcal and Mulberry - VUcal is going away, and a replacement for shared private calendaring, etc. A direction has been recommended from ITS - move to the Exchange Servers (which means Microsoft Outlook). There are other clients that work with exchange servers, but ITS recommends the Outlook platform. LITS will be figuring out how and when to do the migration. It may happen by December.

People’s folders will be copied over, and people will be able to still send mail from Mulberry, but once the switchover happens, people will be strongly encouraged to use Outlook. Jody talked for a bit about distribution lists and the difficulty they are having recreating and moving certain structures over to

Jody is eliciting volunteers to help with training (people who are familiar with or currently use Outlook), and the Staff Development Committee will manage the training.

LITS’s goal: Be VUcal-free by January 1, 2008, and to have Outlook going and training underway, and still have Mulberry available (to have access to group mailboxes and distribution lists that will still work).

3) Discussion of plan to upgrade Unicorn to Oracle - There are many other ILS’s that use Oracle, and it’s just a good thing if we move to that platform. We’ll be able to better integrate services with Unicorn if we are using Oracle. There was a discussion about downtime, and the timing of doing the migration. There will be no percieved downtime except those regularly scheduled downtimes.

GL3.2 = Symphony, formerly Rome. (It’s basically just the fancy name for the next version of Unicorn.) Any questions about the Oracle migration or about the next version of Unicorn can be directed to Dale Poulter.

4) Walker library desktop support changes - Over the course of the year, LITS will be supporting us more with desktop support.

5) RSS for the Divinity Library Lectionary - Jody has been working with Anne Womack and Bill Hook to create an RSS feed for the lectionaries. They created the XML themselves for the RSS feed. They are also using SiteMason to help with the ease of use and maintenance of the feed. This will be going live soon.

6) Workstation replacement plans - They are targeting to remove the Dell 270’s and get new Dell 745’s. There are approximately 100 computers to replace over the course of the year.

7) Patch Tuesday - 49 patches were released today from Microsoft. They will be released to Heard networked staff the next day.

8) Update on search for systems librarian (Jason Battles’ former position) - They have several applicants so far, and the deadline for the position is tomorrow.

9) MS Vista and Office 2007 - Jody would like to come up with a mini boot camp for Vista and MS Office 2007 to help those who work with the public who are already dealing with Vista and Office 2007.

10) They are trying to consolidate idendidty management on the campus - it’s a huge project. They are also trying to work with those who aren’t current Vanderbilt entities, such as alumni, community users, etc. Basically, it will be a huge improvement.

11) ContactVU - a new system that will contain all our personal information used by the Vanderbilt Operators. The Sun Identity Manager and this new ContactVU system will be linked together and be much more secure than it currently is now. Multi-factor authentication will also be used eventually (a thumb as well as a password, for example).

Today we met for our regular Technology & Training Support Coordinators meeting. Jody led the meeting as usual, and we talked about:

1) Two new people on the LITS team: Jodie Gambill and Jim Pleace

2) There are new computers in the Science Library, and mini keyboards in the Music Library

3) Primo development project. They are still working on several bugs (show-stoppers). Jody is happy with how well the ExLibris Primo team is working with him and his team. Julie Loder has been the “problem manager” for Vanderbilt through it all, and deserves special recognition. She joins in on the conference call every Monday.

4) Reports from the ELUNA conference (Ex Libris Users North America). It was in Spearfish, South Dakota. According to attendees, the conference was very enlightening.  Vanderbilt presented 3 sessions on the Primo development project. All sessions were well-attended.

Janice Adlington reported on what she heard about Verde (ExLibris’ electronic resources management system) and Jody reported on what he learned abou Digitool (ExLibris’ digital asset management tool).  This is comparable to ContentDM.

5) Jody mentioned that LITS plans to hold a Primo G.R. 1.0 celebration event on June 20 @ 2:30-4:00 pm (ish) at the Bishop Johnson Cultural Center. (It’s behind Rand, and on the side of the post office.) They will be celebrating all the work the staff has done to get the first general release out. Primo been openly released by ExLibris. There are over 40 Vandy Library staff members that have been involved directly with the project, and almost everyone in the library system has been involved indirectly.  People from ExLibris, Gordon Gee, Paul Gherman, the Digital Library Steering Committee, key faculty, and all the library will be invited. Food and beverages will be served. :-)

6) Patch Tuesday. George Anglin is on vacation, so the patches will come out when he returns. This of course, doesn’t affect us in the Walker Library since we are on a different network.

7) End of fiscal year activities. If you’ve got money to spend, spend it.

8) VUcal (the campus calendaring system) will be terminated at the end of this year. The university is also committed to moving towards using exchange servers (for Outlook). Plus, Mulberry isn’t supported anymore (which is the email service everyone else on campus uses).  But if they are serious about going forward with Outlook, then that will solve both the calendaring and email problem simultaneously.

9) Migrating Unicorn over to Oracle. This might happen later this calendar year, and there would be about 5 days of working on the backup server. If this happens, then there will be a chance to utilize Unicode. No one has been totally successful in doing this, but Stanford is trying to do this. LITS will have to work with SirsiDynix’s schedule for this.

10) John Ozborne - He’s the new contact for the ITS Delivery Manager with LITS. He’s replacing Michael Martin who’s moved on to be the Technology Manager of the Peabody Freshman Commons.

11) Chris Benda will be moving from the Peabody to Divinity Library soon. Also, Jason Battles’ last day is Friday, July 13th and will soon be at the University of Alabama.

Today I attended our monthly Technology & Training Support Coordinators meeting over in the Baker Building. Jody had a full agenda as usual. Well, I did send him several additional questions ahead of time. ;-)

1. Stephen Nordstrom from the Music Library is now going to be joining us as the new music liaison. He’s the Music Cataloger over there.
2. Unicorn Patch cluster to be applied -Nancy is working on this, and it will be coming soon. It will help with the custom reports.
3. MS patch Tuesday report - As always, the TTSC meets on Patch Tuesday. The latest Microsoft patch will be released to all Heard networked computers tonight. I assume Owen will follow their usual procedures for patches.
4. Replacement of older circulating laptops - Recently, there were 11 REALLY old laptops in one of the libraries that were still circulating. LITS is no longer able to purchase support for these laptops, so they have been sent to the Virtual School. New laptops (Dell 620’s) have been purchased with reassessment money. Since the laptops are so heavily used, they wanted to replace them as soon as possible.
5. VUnetID authentication for ILLiad - Dale is meeting with the ILLiad group, and so far, things are going well. They are interested in expanding VUnetID authentication to other services, besides the basic login to ACORN and ILLiad. They are using LDAP servers for authentication.
6. Status report on Primo project - The next site visit with ExLibris will be April 18th and 19th, next Wednesday and Thursday. Julie Loder has been managing all the reporting of problems via the Primo site in OAK (Blackboard). Currently, only people involved in Primo can log in to view the problems. There are 2 new Primo teams: the TestIt Team, and the Usability Team. The project team charges can be viewed on the Digital Library Steering Committee wiki page. From WML, Cynthia Kutka and Laura Norris are on the project teams. (Rachel and Brent are already on the two various delivery Primo GetIt! teams that have been meeting for some time now. The Primo General Release 1.0 will be out around the middle of May 2007. This version will only contain the basic features, not all of them. Jody joked in saying that there will be things that we are guaranteed to like about Primo, as well as things that we will most definitely hate. He also mentioned that the faceted browsing is working well and will certainly help users, although not all of the facets are working correctly. The system overall seems to be running very fast. He hopes at the end of April that all library staff will be able to have a look at the current version of Primo. And once general release 1.o is out, LITS will begin working with ExLibris toward general release 2.0.
7. Vanderbilt Information Technology Services is transitioning all Vanderbilt www.vanderbilt.edu and www3.vanderbilt.edu websites to new server hardware on June 1st. Sites with” vanity” URLs (e.g., its.vanderbilt.edu) are also affected. They have previously communicated this transition to various campus technology groups. We here in Owen are fine. For more info, see this announcement.
8. I asked Jody to talk about Blackboard becoming more compatible with Windows Vista, since I knew there were some problems and that freshmen and anyone who gets a new laptop will be encountering problems. Jody said that when using Blackboard in IE7 on Vista (or in Safari on Mac OSX) things don’t work quite right (for example, you cannot save your changes). Blackboard works just fine in Firefox on Vista, I must add. :-) LITS plans on doing a patch level upgrade in June. Blackboard anticipates that this problem will be fixed over the summer. They are holding off the rollout of Vista until summer of 2008 (based on the recommendations from Gartner and others). Also, Vista isn’t entirely compatible with WorkFlows, so Rachel will need to check with Owen IT about their rollout schedule of Vista.
9. My second question for Jody was about the email client ITS has chosen (or are getting closer to considering). The Email Task Force is still investigating things, but ITS will primarily be supporting Outlook, it seems. They are migrating incoming students to this environment, as well as small departments. Many individuals are migrating to Outlook as well. Jody reassured those at the meeting who were concerned about security and hackers who hate Microsoft. Jody explained that there are a lot of protections built in that have made it more secure than previous versions. Outlook allows for enriched communication (images, html, etc.) that are a big improvement over Mulberry, and those extras also have settings that can be adjusted for different levels of security. There was a concern in how group mailboxes currently established in Mulberry would be dealt with, and they are investigating imap mailbox issues. But as you know, we here in Owen aren’t really affected by this (not yet) because we are already using Outlook, have exchange servers, and use Active Directory.
10. LITS is getting ready to rollout a “lite” RMS for VUPrint and for other groups and services within the library system.
11. I also asked Jody if he has heard anything about the servers in Owen moving over to ITS and if it is a push from Matt Hall based on his vision for the campus’s networked architecture? Jody said, no, he hasn’t heard anything. But he did talk about servers hosted in LITS vs. the servers over on Peabody’s campus that are maintained locally by ITS (they can still be maintained remotely too). Jody emphasized that the cost of buying and maintaining the actual server hardware is now dwarfed by the cost of cooling them. The new HVAC system in the General Library Building is coming along okay. They now have plenty of cooling, but are looking to get more power.

That’s all!

At the Technology & Training Support Coordinators meeting today, we talked about many things. I was a few minutes late, so I missed the first part of meeting, but still heard some updates on the first item on the agenda.

1) As you know (hopefully), users can now use their VUnet ID and password for authentication into Acorn to renew books, set up Acorn notes, etc.. There has been some confusion among users in that some are using their VUnet ID and instead of using their VUnet password, they are still using their Acorn Pin as their password. This, of course, doesn’t work. There are also users that don’t have a VUnet ID. They can still use their Social Security Number and Acorn Pin to log in. But soon (a few weeks?) users that don’t have a VUnet ID can use the same login information that they use when they sign in to use VUprint.

This means that for a while, there will be 3 different ways users can log into Acorn (all options are not necessarily available to each individual user). I just thought that I should point this out. They are 1) VUnet ID/password, 2) SSN/Acorn PIN, and 3) VUprint login/password.

Also, the good news is that plans for the development for a more universal unique ID will be starting this fall. More info on this to come later.

2) Jim Webb is replacing Flo Wilson as the TTSC representative for the Office of the University Librarian.

3) Patch Cluster 5. It’s the highly descriptive name for Sirsi’s new enhancements. The upgrade starts Wednesday evening at midnight, and folks will be required to update Thursday morning. While you are more than likely sleeping, the system will be down anywhere between 15 -60 minutes (as Dale Poulter predicts). An email has already been sent about this.

4) Judy Carter was happy to announce that LITS’s workstation deployment project is almost done. (And then the fun starts all over again at the beginning of the next fiscal year!) LITS is also working on a life-cycle management and replacement policy for circulating laptops.

5) It’s patch Tuesday. Upgrades to your computers are out! Please remember to run your Windows updates on your home computers -for your own sanity.

6) Daylight Saving Time. Yes, it’s that topic again. LITS did all their patching, and Acorn and most things on the Heard Network seem fine. People’s PDA’s are probably still struggling with the time change thing, and Exchange servers, and the clients that connect to them (for Microsoft Outlook) are still unhappy (as we here in WML know quite well!) For tips on dealing with this murky stuff, please see my previous post.

7) Exodus, the internal IM client that LITS has been beta testing for what seems like forever now, was just upgraded. I haven’t played with it yet to see exactly what the new additions are, but from a quick glance, it doesn’t look like much. In WML, Laura and Rachel are the only ones using it. There are several other folks within the library system using it, too. If you are interested in trying it out, just let Rachel know! She can send you all the info you need to get it set up, and can stop by for a quick demo if needed.

8) Jody talked briefly about the 2 new Primo Project Teams currently being formed. He only has about 8 volunteers out of the entire library system, and they need more. If you are at all interested or know of someone who might be interested (and haven’t already volunteered or are already on a Primo development team), please contact Jody Combs as soon as possible. They want to get these teams started next week.