NAAUG/SMUG: The big news in USMAI work this past month was in the preparation for and participation in the NAAUG and SMUG meetings. The conferences were both all-around big successes. Kudos to Betty Day who co-chaired the program for SMUG and Carlen Ruschoff, Marlene Vikor and Lulu Barnachea for the success of the NAAUG meeting. Kudos also to all the volunteers that helped make the conferences run smoother. In addition to all the work done in hosting the conferences there were many presentations involving USMAI staff:

• Laura Wrubel and Kari Schmidt presented on results of metasearch usability testing (plans to present this again to USMAI) at SMUG.
• Lea Messman-Mandicott (with help from Jamie Bush and Jean Phillips) presented Yours + Mine = Ours, Sharing Resources Sharing in the USMAI at NAAUG.
• Jean and Marlene also worked with Michele Newberry and Maureen Zajkowski to talk about Consortium database architecture and its affect on functionality.
• Janet Siar and Jamie presented on the topic of the Journal usage study done at UMCP.

The ITD Open House on Wednesday was also a big success. There were an estimated 30-40 people from the NAAUG and SMUG conferences who attended. More details will be available when the trip reports are put up on the USMAI web site.

Research Port and SFX:

• Usability testing: metasearch--first round of testing conducted at CP, BC, SM, and ES
• Usability testing: SFX v.3 has started
• Campuses finalized menu options for SFX v.3; work continues with July 15 move to v.3

MdUSA (yes, it still exists): work underway to set up approximately 12 MDL schools on EZ Proxy so that we can take MdUSA down.

Aleph Version 16:

• Continued to test year-end closeout procedures in Version 16.
• Worked on getting on a regular schedule for applying fixes to Aleph as released by ExLibris. Implemented up to Service Pack #1049.
• Patron privacy: Eliminated bursar names report from production. Turns out no one was using it.
• Improved the monthly Circulations statistics report. Began work on Circ. stats. by IP address report.

Electronic Resource Licensing:

• finalized USMAI and MDL July renewal pricing and placed orders
• sent final pricing to USMERC representatives
• placed end-of-year big ticket orders for College Park

Personnel: have hired two additional graduate assistants for E-Content team. One will work on usability testing and Web development for both Research Port and ALEPH.

Authentication: Demonstrated preliminary findings concerning the implementation of Shibboleth to the USM Middleware Group.

Patron Loader: Please see the Patron Loader status page for up-to-date information. UMES is close to loading into live for the first time. We are evaluating the many requests for Patron load and email notice work for this summer that is described in campus priority documents. We hope to have a plan out soon that accomodates as many requests as possible. We are working with Salisbury on email notices.

EDI Loader: See the EDI Loader status page. Invoice testing complete for BC, FSU, and SU; they are ready for production. Load of order records with BBS/YBP: continue to work on workflow and test Ex Libris programs.

Prange Education project: Completed the implementation of a Japanese catalog for a subset of Prange materials in test. The url for this catalog is: http://alephtest.umd.edu:8993/base=prangeed. This catalog is being reviewed by staff, if approved it will be moved to the live database.

Infrastructure: Met with SUN representatives to discuss hardware replacement for the live Aleph server, etc. Planning to "refresh" the test database with live data beginning 6/16/05 to aid in testing year-end closeout and patron loads.

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