KYVL Endeavor Consortium Working Group

Quarterly meeting

September 10, 2004

Tari Keller, Dave Block, Titus Anderson, Kelly Vickery, Linda Voyles, Nelda Sims, Mark Paul, Paul Fuller, Michael Stapleton, John Detwiler, Margaret Foote, Cathy Reilender, Perry Bratcher, Elsie Pritchard, Gerry Williams, Enid Wohlstein, Aleeah McGinnis (via Video conference)

1) Endeavor Update

Linda Voyles:

• Unicode should go into General Release either next week or the week after. The “Roll Your Own” documents are ready and improved. The “Release Handbook” has been greatly improved; it is 63 pages and should be a compilation of all the essential information about changes in the latest release.
• Voyager 5 is in Beta until the end of the year. It will have new functions like bulk patron purge, global data change, and many suggestions from the enhancement committees.
• LinkfinderPlus 4.0 was released in August now supports openurl standard 1.0, Unicode, and has an expanded knowledge database.
• I.L.L. 4.1 was released in August.
• Voyager Meridan Electronic Resources Management system was announced at A.L.A.
• New Director of Marketing, Ron Rainer.
• Support Web has been successful transferred to its own server.
• End User planning has already begun
• Voyager is doing more WebX training, and if you have ideas or requests for training please send them to Linda Voyles—Mark suggested a PreBulk session. Linda suggested that we might want a WebX session on Voyager 5.0 update for the next quarterly meeting in December.

2) Training Budget.

Is still being investigated.

3) Project Updates

• SSL encryption for WebVoyage – is still being investigated. Mark requested (and was seconded by several others) that Voyager should develop a system that will allow authentication via LDAP, or other protocols. Linda mentioned that she thought they were looking at it for their digital products, but she didn’t think they were doing so for Voyager.
• Response Testing – Original group will look at the currently compiled test result data to boil it down to a set of benchmark figures. We might investigate other tests for solely network response tests and server processing load tests. We also might investigate a client response test. The consortium will re-run the current test again on October 27, 2004, at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. EST. Tari will send out the specific searches that we will all use on our systems.
• Service Level Agreement – Work on this continues
• TestLib and Unicode Release – Michael reported that KCTCS’s simultaneous searching broke after the last patch was applied to the main server. Michael had an incident opened. Endeavor investigated but claimed the Z39.50 settings or connection was the problem; known simultaneous search problems have been fixed in the Unicode release. KCTCS has used the test server to test Unicode release on their data and the conversion created fewer than 300 errors from a database of nearly 400,000 records.

4) WestLib Time out issues.

Endeavor suggested increasing the timeout on the firewall to 12 hours, and this seems to have lessened the severity of the performance problems. The situation has greatly improved.

5) When to patch?

Everyone agreed that we ought to apply both the January and May patches to Voyager. Each hub will schedule a time that is most convenient to apply their patches. Westlib will likely patch the third Friday of November. Eastlib will let everyone know when the patch date is scheduled. When the patches are applied we will all need to upgrade our Voyager client modules. U.K. has deployed these patch clients to some of our workstations in order to get Media Scheduler working, and has seen no ill effects. Linda Voyles said the Endeavor does NOT suggest operating with missed matched patches and clients.

6) Test Server Use.

After the KCTCS successful experience of Unicode data conversion, only U.K. opted to run their own Unicode conversion test on the test server. U.K., L.C.C. and KCTCS would also like to schedule the test server for April or May to run a de-duplication process for the move of LCC to KCTCS. They also need to schedule the test server for May or June to use in the actual transfer of LCC records to KCTCS. We will likely upgrade the two hubs next summer, and Nelda urged the consortium to solve the continuous OPAC problem that happened on WestLib during the last upgrade.

Next meeting is December 3, 2004.

Respectfully submitted by Kelly Vickery

9/10/2004