KCVL Technology Subcommittee
Meeting Record
September 14, 2000
CPE, meeting room A.
Present: Kelly Vickery, Perry Bratcher, Gerry Williams, Gary Flanagan, Dave Block, Tari Keller, Stacey Nickell, Elsie Pritchard, Aleeah McGinnis, Tonya Thompson, Roberta Kerby, Susan Brown, John Detwiler, Weiling Liu,, Margaret Willingham, Todd King, Rose Davis, Paul Miller, Nelda Jane Sims, Keith Stevenson, Cindy Page, Miko Pattie.
Tari Kellor urged us all to respond to Stacey Nickell's request for information on the ratio of system librarians to total student enrollment. This will allow a comparison of system staff to student ratio's between KCTCS, and other state post-secondary institutions in Kentucky.
"Troubleshooting Voyager for Eastlib Hub". We discussed the draft handout of the Troubleshooting guide. More explicit instructions were added at various points. Gary Flanagan questioned if the "System Status" link at the http://eastlib.kyvl.org url would indicate whether the web server on eastlib was running or not. Dave Block will check to see if it does or doesn't. Tari indicated that it would be an easy matter to replace all of the eastlib references to westlib in the document for use by those institutions housed on that server. It was agreed that each institution would probably want to add their own descriptions to the final version of the troubleshooting guide.
The consortium will get a test server, which will be housed at the University of Louisville. Annual hardware maintenance for the server will be $4132 and annual software maintenance will be $8,500. The Endeavor Consortium Working Group tried to decide on a formula to divide the cost of the maintenance among the consortium members, peers and addons, but consensus on a formula was difficult to reach. The average cost among all voyager members was ($12,632) / 14 = $903 per institution. A more equitable proposal was to use the ratio of Full Time Enrollment amongst institutions applied to the total amount of maintenance, but it was difficult to figure in non-student based institutions like Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives, Lexmark, and Norton's Hospital. Objections were raised to using the total number of volumes cataloged as the factor. An arbitrary factor would need to be created to distinguish between large user, peer institutions (like KDLA) as opposed to small user, addon institutions (like St. Catherine). Full time employment was mentioned as a possible substitute for FTE, but this was rejected. There is currently a percentage breakdown for other types of consortium maintenance and this was considered a good alternative. Miko Pattie agreed to look through the possible scenarios and produce a proposal for a formula that the working group could agree to.
Date for Voyager Upgrade. At the previous meeting we had agreed to a potential date to upgrade to Voyager 2000 on December 18th if the AIX version went Gold within a reasonable time. It does not appear that Solaris will go Gold any time soon. Thus, AIX will also not go Gold because the AIX version is ported from the Solaris version once it has been dubbed 'completed'. Members of the consortium have also been hearing information from other institutions, which have gone to the betas of 2000, and the reports were unsettling. A December installation of Voyager 2000 was no longer an acceptable date for the working group. In January, before the semester begins, we would also be very tight on time, as we would during Spring break. May seemed to appeal to most members of the group -- most of the bugs should be worked out of the 2000 version at that point, and the majority of the consortium's patrons would not be using the system in May. Some concern was expressed that we would not have a full year's use of Voyager 2000, and that Endeavor's VUGM training would be out of sync with our implementation of Voyager 2000: they would be marketing 2001 when we would be just upgrading to 2000. Training could be extended into the Spring or we could use our follow-up dates late. Susan Brown suggested that we simply make May our annual upgrade date so as to get a full year of use from each upgrade and we would not have to worry as much about bugs in a new system. This suggestion was well received by most members. Tentative dates for implementing the upgrade to Voyager 2000 are now: Eastlib the week of May 14, and Westlib the week of May 21.
Training schedule. We have 43 days of Endeavor training, which is equivalent to $25,800. Miko requested input from the group about their training needs and presented it in spreadsheet form. A significant number of additional requests for training were made at the meeting and Miko said she would total it and see if we exceeded the $25,800. If more money became available it might be possible to apply it toward more training. Perry Bratcher asked if some funds could be applied toward travel expenses because many of these institutions were not reimbursing employees for travel. Miko explained that it was a firm policy of the Council on Post-Secondary Education that no funds would be applied toward travel. The Bulk Load class and the Electronic Reserves class were half-day classes, but there were enough requests to combine them into a single day. There would be SQL training on November 27 at UK, and also an EDI class, and Bulk Load and Electronic Reserves classes at other locations in Kentucky over the remaining days of November.
Kentucky Voyager Users' Group. Roberta Kirby reported there were 65 people currently registered for the KVUG meeting in October, and that all of the "Acquisitions Roadshow" seats (50 total) were taken. Since the Roadshows were filled registration for that event has been closed, but we would be opening it up again to allow people to register as Alternates, incase openings should occur. A final update to the web pages will be made on October 16 indicating the Schedule for the two days, the agenda for the business meeting, parking instructions, and biographies for the slate of candidates as KVUG's new officers. Roberta did express concern at how the change in date for the implementation of Voyager 2000 might effect the positive impact of the Acquisition Roadshows, and thought the issue of offering refunds to those who might not want to attend -- do to the delay -- must be brought before the KVUG steering committee.
Elsie Pritchard confirmed that Alan Manifold will be teaching a class on writing SQL for MS Access at the University of Kentucky on November 9th and 10th. The 24 seats for these classes have been filled and the cost will have to be split between the participants, and that cost will not be exactly known until after Alan submits his bill for all and sundry. Tari is investigating the possibility of letting Alan bill UK and having the various participants reimburse UK, but this has yet to be finalized with the UK business office.
Benchmark vs. Stress testing. Tari discussed the differences between a stress test and a benchmark test and questioned whether we wanted a stress or a benchmark test. Gary Flanagan shared some of the testing procedures that were used in Morehead, and the testing committee is thinking of adopting Gary's or a similar procedure and perhaps augmenting the stress of the test with a series of Microsoft Access queries.
There will be a meeting of the Endeavor Consortium Working Group the evening of October 26th immediately after the Consortium's quarterly meeting with Endeavor from 3:00 to 5:00. Meetings after that will be set at some future date, and we will explore the possibility of meeting electronically.
This page was last updated Sept 25, 2000.
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