E-Resources in the Catalog (ERIC):

• Worked on SFX interface and services to support releasing Find It in the catalog.
• New services included book reviews and customized links to ILL.
• Conducted additional round of usability testing on changes to Find It and the catalog. Presented interface work and usability findings at ERIC II forum.
• The ERIC II Forum was held in mid-January. Comments made during the forum and after we reviewed and considered by the Task Group. Some changes were made to the interface. Most comments will be considered as we work on our Next Steps, as outlined at the forum. There is some documentation on the ERIC Web site.
• Find It in the catalog went live on January 25th!!!!!

Inter Library Loan:

• The consortial Illiad project kicked into high gear this past month. ITD has a team working on configuring Illiad to work for the 8 institutions. The Resource Sharing Task Group has an Illiad Users Group established. Atlas Training has been scheduled in two sites. This training has been opened up to staff from independent Illiad sites within the USMAI. Improvements have been made in the interface between Illiad and Aleph. To make use of these improvements independent Illiad sites need to be on the latest version of Illiad.

Authentication:

• Shibboleth : the project to "shibbolize" Metalib authentication has been completed in test. We now need to move the changes to live. Our next project is to see if we can use Shibboleth with our consortial Illiad set up. Our goal is to achieve single sign-on between ResearchPort and Illiad. This first phase of implementing Shibboleth will only work for those services that use the Aleph Patron file as the Patron Directory. If you use a local, campus directory for a service the IT support for that directory will need to install and configure Shibboleth for it.

Infrastructure:

• ITD swapped the old SUN E-3500 server bought to house Aleph in 2001, for a much faster SUNFIRE 2900 with less than 3 hours of downtime! Due to excruciatingly detailed planning by Hans Breitenlohner we were able to swap servers in less time than it takes to backup the data in Aleph. Our original estimate of required downtime was around 8 hours. The old E-3500 was packaged and returned to SUN as part of a deal for a reduced price on the 2900 (all 1200 pounds of it). We have a number of cleanup tasks that still remain.
• Netbackup server is now on a separate physical server from the Aleph production server, this should free up the Aleph server and help us in reconfiguring backups across all servers.

ResearchPort:

• Research Port interface changes: On recommendation of UITG and COIuserinter, added search summary screen to Cross Search, set default search to Advanced, and removed Simple/Advanced tabs from search display.

Electronic Resource Management (Verde):

• Worked on understanding Verde licensing attribute and mapping Verde licensing terms to EBSCO MDL license.
• Met with Ex Libris staff at ALA Midwinter to discuss Verde implementation.

Electronic Resource Licensing:

• Met with e-resource vendors at ALA Midwinter to discuss consortial subscriptions.

Patron Loader/Email notices:

• HSL's new patron file has been reviewed by HSL and is now ready to be loaded into production.
• Towson has now corrected their borrower type issues and has loaded a new fileinto LIVE with relatively few errors.
• UMUC is now providing a combined (fac/staff/students) patron file which has speeded manual loading.
• The new CP patron file (fac/staff/students) is ready to be moved into production as soon as we verify that all duplicates have been resolved.
• Daily email reminders are now in production in CP.
• BC has given me the specifications for text on theirs and I will be testing that soon. BC email reminders have moved ahead of the BC lost/fine and hold notices.
• CS has contacted us and is ready to sit down to discuss their patron loader. Their IT people have already review the USMAI patron format.
• UB and FS will get back to us when they are ready to discuss their loaders.
• Review the patron loader status page for more details.

Aleph:

• WorldCat synchronization: 2,838,957 bibliographic records were extracted and sent to OCLC for processing. We have suspended the regular weekly extract (XPT) sent to OCLC until they are finished updating campus holdings.
• Authorities: 10,000 sample records were sent to the Authorities vendor. The updated bibliographic records and their authority records have been sent back to us. We are working on loading these in such a way that they can be reviewed by the Authorities group. ITD had forgotten to send an additional file with 400 hand-picked sample records. They were sent in early February.
• Secured catalog interface for login and patron information
• Fixed a problem in the catalog with using the "back" button (Rx#939).
• A record number of circulation events were schedule between the 2005 holidays and the end of Janaury 2006, more than 30 events scheduled. There were at least another 10 routine circulation events that were requested via the AlephRx that should have been on the circulation calendar.
• In the month of January 2006 there were 16 patron loads into the live database completed.
• BC Monthly Reserve Media report written and put into production.
• Prange Education collection - produced 100 records for Prange education collection in MARC format.

EDI Invoice Loading:

• See the EDI Loader status page.
• Received fax from Hein on setup requirements and requested a sample file to for testing

EDI Ordering:

• Information about this ongoing project is available on the COI site for Acquisitions and Serials under EDI.

Personnel:

• Resignation of Fahnbulleh Zarzar, an ITD programmer dedicated to Aleph support and development.
• Concluded work of Web Application Developer search committee; candidate begins in ITD in February.

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Content questions should be directed to <Jamie Bush.