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Library Managers

University of Waterloo
Library Managers, July 20, 2011
9:30 a.m., LIB 428

Present: Pascal Calarco, Betty Graf, Jennifer Haas, Mark Haslett (Chair), Christine Jewell, Michele Laing, Sharon Lamont, Susan Mavor, Alex McCulloch, Carl Nagel, Richard Pinnell, Carolyn Vincent (Recorder)

Regrets: Annie Bélanger, Eric Boyd, Susan Routliffe, Mary Stanley, Debbie Tytko, Annette Dandyk

1. Chairs Remarks
• Recognition and Commendation
July anniversaries:
July 1 - Susan Seabrook, Special Collections, 20 years
July 2 - Lynda Johnson, Circulation, 25 years
July 26 - Connie Kovac, ISR, 35 years

Mark congratulated Eva Dodsworth who is featured on the cover of the OLA Access magazine.

2. Business Arising from June 15
#1 Pilot Video
A special Managers meeting was held on June 27. They viewed an Instructional Video created by several uWaterloo Librarians, and discussed a proposal to establish an Instructional Video Pilot Project Group and develop a second video. The project would be a pilot until at least the 2nd video has been assessed. Managers agreed that the group could move forward.

Action: Jennifer will be asked to give a report to Managers in September. Richard will ask Eva Dodsworth if she would be interested in joining the group.

3. a) Welcome to Pascal
Mark welcomed Pascal to his first Library Managers meeting.

b) Around the Table Updates and Introductions
Library Managers introduced themselves to Pascal and provided him with a brief description of their areas of responsibility within the Library.

Betty
Betty attended an OCUL Cataloguing meeting the last week of June. The discussion focused on cataloguing of electronic books housed on Scholars Portal. The group discussed the problems with files of MARC records distributed for the electronic books. It was agreed that it would improve the process if files of MARC records were evaluated by cataloguers prior to distribution. In order to move the records through as quickly as possible, sites were asked to accept responsibility for checking records by a particular vendor. Staff at Waterloo, Guelph, Brock and Nippissing volunteered to each evaluate a particular vendor’s records, to identify problems to communicate back to the vendor and to fix the records prior to release to other OCUL sites.

OCUL has also set aside a sum of money for the cataloguing of ebooks. The group recommended that the money be used to hire and pay a portion of the salary of MLIS students to work at various sites. This recommendation will be taken to the OCUL executive.

4. “IT” Projects – update

Pascal
Voyager/Primo/SFX:
• Meeting last Friday to start initial planning for next version of Voyager WebVoyage as a first step to planning for Voyager 8, which is available now; plans are to upgrade TRELLIS week of Aug. 22
• Charles Woods will perform the Primo 3.1 installation and hotfix installation tomorrow, July 21; Alison Hitchens in particular has been quite busy with post Primo 3 fixes and tweaks
• Pascal met with Alison and Charles to get background on SFX MARCIt, a data service from Ex Libris that provides MARC records for ejournals held in aggregator databases
• Webinar on the UBC Mondo licensing database, which has been adopted at OCUL and renamed the OUR database; we are learning about this and will be talking more with our colleagues in TUG
Systems:
• We’ve looked at some tools and approaches for project management and issue tracking in Systems, which has been educational for Pascal and Systems folk
• Pascal has had individual meetings with everyone in Systems for his orientation, and started meeting Cataloguing folks too
• Reviewing position descriptions in Systems and Pascal will be working with individuals involved, Sharon, LibExec and HR on those where necessary before the end of the summer
Chris Gray:
• Chris and Doug Morton implemented and tested some changes for EZ Proxy 5.4 that are needed for the Illumina content shift from Scholar’s Portal to ProQuest; these are happily in place as of last week
• Chris was able to resolve some issues with the most recent update of the Ontario German Bibliography
• With the recent decision to not send Waterloo theses to ProQuest, we’re turning attention to UWSpace content preservation efforts more, which may necessitate an upgrade of DSpace over the next few months
• Chris has been working closely with Carl on system upgrades to migrate the libstaff1 server to more space
• Chris and Pascal investigated options with improved Ares integration with Desire2Learn for the Fall semester and Pascal had a brief discussion with Alex on this strategy; Chris will tackle a local solution provided he has time next month to do so
Other upcoming issues:
• Interest and opportunity for increased IT support for students as part of the Student Success initiative, and the Library may be part of this
• Pascal has joined the UW-ACE group, and will be involved in the rollout of Desire2Learn as another advocate for the Library’s engagement there along with Sandra
• Digital preservation needs and strategy from the University and Library perspective

Carl
Workstation/ Laptop Deployment
• 109 staff workstations with Windows 7 and Office 2010 have been deployed.
• Departments still remaining are Cataloguing and Acquisitions and several in Circulation. This is about 40 more workstations.
• Holiday scheduling has made deployment more difficult.
• There are also 40 new workstation for the Davis Information Commons whose deployment is dependent on working out the configuration issues of Windows 7 in our public environment. We are investigating new software (Fortres 101) to replace Microsoft’s Steady State ( a key piece of our security infrastructure) which they no longer support in Windows 7.
• Fifteen replacement laptops for a portion of our aging laptop infrastructure have arrived and are being configured. These will be significantly more powerful and able to better run ArcGIS software for the map library’s training sessions. We are planning to have these ready for the fall training schedule.

Public Printing
• We have discovered very specific circumstances that lead to free public printing. The solution to this problem is still under investigation by the vendor. Instances of free printing are currently accounting for about 8-9% of all printing. We have a mechanism to stop this from happening but it will prevent all printing from student laptops via PrinterOn as well. Unless we note a significant increase in use of this printing loophole, we will wait for a fix from the vendor for the time being but initiate the ‘fix’ noted above if necessary for the beginning of the fall term.
• As part of the Workstation Review and now the Davis Noise Abatement work group, we are looking into relocating the noisy public printing service in the Davis library to a location adjacent to the main entrance and the copy centre. In addition to the move, it is planned to add an additional print release station to accommodate the high demands at peak periods which generate long lineups.
• PrinterOn is due for an upgrade and costing is being investigated.

Library Staff Server (libserv1)
• An emergency situation with the 7 ½ year old staff server for network shared documents and printing necessitated a quick move to the VMWare virtual environment this morning. We had hoped to upgrade the operating system to Windows 2008R2 at the same time but this is a much more complicated process requiring the VMWare servers to be upgraded first. The move was successful.

VMWare ESX upgrade
• Chris Gray is in the midst of planning an upgrade of VMWare ESX 3.5 to 4.1. Licensing is covered under our current maintenance contract. This upgrade will increase the amount of available storage space on the SAN to accommodate the relocation and upgrade of the library staff server mentioned above as well as future needs. This upgrade will also make it possible to do live resizing of storage space without the need for any downtime for our virtual servers.

Library OU in ADS to be moved to NEXUS this summer
• The specific implications for the library are still unknown. It is expected to be mostly transparent to end users but there could be issues with SharePoint, KMS licensing, etc. We are counting on IST to advise us on this well in advance of the move which is anticipated late August or early September.

Power Outage for Porter Library in August
• Facilities has been notified of the need for a weekend power shutdown for numerous buildings on campus including the Porter and Map Library buildings on Saturday, August 20th. This will affect all services based on the library’s local servers except for the Voyager Library catalogue system which will remain available via a direct URL. The duration of the shutdown is expected to be 4 to 5 hours within a window of 18 hours starting 6:00 a.m. on Saturday morning and continuing until midnight.
• Managers agreed that Porter would be closed for the day.
• Alison Hitchens will communicate with TUG partners on the issue.
Action: Alison

Computer Hardware Replacement
• As part of a multi-year plan, the four VMWare ESX servers are scheduled to be replaced this fiscal along with other Blade Center components and the four Primo Servers are currently scheduled for next year.

5. President’s and Provost’s June 30th Meeting on Campus Priorities – update
Mark and Sharon attended the President’s and Provost’s June 30th meeting on campus priorities. Sharon noted that it was a good experience to be in a room with leaders from across campus.

The President and Provost indicated they will be moving forward immediately on the following four priorities (from the Top 10 Priorities 2011-12):

- Improving communication with various stakeholders on campus and off
- Developing the Student Success Office, including activities related to first-year transition and students-at-risk
- Starting a process of reducing the high student/faculty ratio
- Developing measurements of research impact, developing a suitable data base, and communicating the results to various stakeholders

Sharon reminded Library Managers that Sean Van Koughnett, Director of the new Student Success Office, will be giving a presentation and discussion about the Student Success Office in the Library on Friday, August 19th.

6. Library Review
Mark provided Library Managers with the framework and context for the Library Review before having a conversation with Geoff McBoyle and Bruce Mitchell.

 

Next meeting: August 3 [rescheduled to August 9]


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

 

 


 


 


 


 


 




 




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September 17, 2011