Endeavor Consortium Work Group Minutes

Nelda Sims, Tari Keller, Keith Stevenson, Kelly Vickery, Todd King, Margaret Foote, Dave Block,  Miko Pattie, Cathy Reilender, Stacey Nickell, Gary Flanagan, Perry Bratcher, Mark Paul, Aleeah McGinnis (via Video conference), Paul Fuller, Susan Brown, Rose Davis, Gerry Williams, Elsie Pritchard, John Detwiler, Charlene Davis.

Todd King introduced Margaret Foote as the new EKU systems librarian.

The bills for the Manifold training sessions will be sent out soon and should be $140 for all sessions, or $70 or less for 1 day.

There have been several days of very poor performance for several institutions on the Eastlib server.  There were reports from Eastern Kentucky University, Morehead University, and the University of Kentucky.  No significant problems were reported by Northern Kentucky University, or other systems housed on Eastlib.  Todd King said that October 23 was one of the worst days.  The problems are intermittent and manifest themselves with repeated attempts to search the OPAC resulting in failure -- either time-out errors or server failure errors -- and greatly inconveniencing library patrons.  Dave Block investigated and it seems that run-away z39.50 searches and active but unused WebVoyage sessions were part of the problem.  Dave had installed a work-around that created other problems, and Endeavor has tweaked their work-around.  When the problem was at its worst complacency from Endeavor was a problem: Dave had reported the problem as a level 2, but was told by Endeavor that it was a level 3 problem.  We felt because of the terrible inconvenience to our patrons that it deserved a higher priority. Problems do not seem apparent on Westlib; U of L walk through kills session of over 1 hour.

Conference phone call to Kay Braun and Matt at EISI technical support.  Kay and Matt Ball confirm that turning off telnet and switching to SSH protocol 2 is not a problem for EISI technical support -- they have SSH and PuTTY clients.  Some ECWG members are still having problems with odd formats resulting in files when using sFTP and Endeavor may not have sFTP clients in house.  Kay will check with other Voyager sFTP users to see if there are any incidents.  We might try tunneling when using sFTP.  Dave has turned off Telnet on Eastlib and Keith will turn it off on Westlib.

We described the above OPAC problems occurring on Eastlib to Kay and Matt.  They feel the pending AIX WebVoyage patch should fix the problems. WebVoyage patch is currently in testing.  Kay will look at tuning the Apache server.  If problems occur call EISI support or Kay directly and give the 53947 incident number.  The problem can best be examined if they can check the system when the problem is active.

Keith inquiries about the Oracle Listner patch, and Kay has heard that it should soon be available. End conference call.

Gary Flanagan asks about writing and running Perl scripts on the servers.  He would like to implement Michael Doran’s New Books list and MARC PM utility.  What guidelines do we want for entering and using PERL scripts on Eastlib and Westlib.  Keith Stevenson  would like to review scripts before implementing, Dave Block does not want to be in the position of reviewing every Perl script.  Susan Brown suggests that the librarians test the scripts on the Test server before implementing.  Keith suggest that we use Perl 5.00503-it is an older form of Perl, but very stable.  It is agreed that systems librarians need to inform Dave and Keith before implementing a Perl script.

Gary reported that the script to bulk delete the EBSCO records worked very well-only left 26 out of 5000 records, and they are investigating the causes for the 26.

In order to determine how frequently the systems are being used we need a standard means of gathering statistics across all library system.  It is agreed that each library will send an excel spreadsheet of the RECORDCOUNT_VW table to Susan Brown by the January, 8.  This table is found in the Voyager Access file Reports.mdb. 

Next meeting will be on Thursday March 7^th.

[This was later changed to Wednesday March 6^th.]

Respectfully submitted by Kelly Vickery

2/26/02