2011/01/31-02/03 - Goodbye, Auburn!

The big news this week is that I just turned in my resignation from the Auburn libraries. It's time to move on to other things.

Otherwise it's been a frustrating week. I'm porting our ETD site to a new server. The ETD site currently runs DSpace-1.5 in a glassfish v2 (Sun Appserver) container on an old Sun Solaris box, and we're moving to an Ubuntu VM and glassfish v3.1. I was able to copy all the data over, and boot up the server, but there's some subtle bug where DSpace-1.5 does some invalid redirects at login time that glassfish-v3 complains about. Now I'm trying to upgrade to DSpace-1.6.2 which fixes the problem, and working through the little problems that keep tripping me up.

I also spent some time preparing for next Monday's minnows project training session with Prof. Armbruster's lab.

Anyway, I have two weeks left, so I'm going to try to finish the server migrations we have in process for ETD, repo, and vufind, and make sure the minnows project is in a sane state before I leave.

2011/01/24-27 Viva Tunisia!

It was a quiet week at the library. I brought up vufind on the new devcat64 server that we want to move to, and I worked on the Minnows project site. I think I've got the different parts of the site tied together in a reasonable way, and Tony and Clint plan to do a pass over the site to improve it. Jon is also going to move the server to a production environment, so we'll be all set for some training with Prof. Armbruster's team after that.

Next week I hope to continue working on the Minnows site, prepare for the training class, and try to bring up a copy of the ETD repository on a new server.

2010/01/18-20 Hurray 4 MLK

I love short weeks, and MLK day is my favorite holiday, so it was a double good week. I worked on a few tasks this week. First, I began building the new vufind dev server. Solr is up and running fine, but I ran into some problems trying to upgrade to Smarty 3 - I'll work on that next week.

I met with Jon Armbruster on Thursday to review the minnows project. The meeting went well. I'm going to try to tie up some loose ends next week, and arrange a training session with Jon and his students the week after, so they can begin testing the data-submission and approval workflows. We're shooting for an April 1 release for internal review.

I fixed a couple bugs in a library that underlies the circulation-request project. I also want to work on circ-req next week. I need to add e-mail support, enable staff-group based security, flesh out the request metadata, show notes in the UI, and add support for "lost trace" requests.

Finally, Aaron is my new boss this year as I've been moved into the systems group as part of the tech service reorganization. I attended my first "systems department" meeting on Wednesday. I'll try to remember to get an update on Aaron's request for clearance to open source some of Clint's code. If the lawyers don't reply to Aaron by next week, then I'll suggest that we send an e-mail to tell the lawyers what we're doing, and to let us know if they have a problem with it. I'm sure they don't care.

2010/01/12-13 - Auburn wins BCS

Auburn shut down Monday and Tuesday for bad weather, so it was another short week. I got some good work done on the minnows repository code. I'll try to arrange a meeting with Armbruster next week after talking things over with Clint and Tony.

2010/01/03-06 back to the grind!

It was a good first week back after winter break. I deployed an early beta version of a request tracker for circulation. J.P. likes what I showed him, and recommended that we extend the tool to also track missing-trace requests. I'll pickup work on that tool in a couple weeks.

I released a vufind patch to fix a bug in the link-resolver integration.

I wrote a javascript module that integrates the new webcat Voyager OPAC with the click tracker.

I normalized the advisor names in our ETD collection. Scanning through the spreadsheet of 7000 names was annoying, but it will be easier next time. I also want to add some pick-list support to the form that the graduate student fills in to encourage the student to pick the variation of an advisor's name that is already in the system, but that's a project for another day. The e-mail excerpt below has more details.

Jon is going to build us a clean 64-bit devcat virtual machine for us to build up a fresh vufind install. Clint and I will probably work on that next week.

Finally, we ended the week with an e-mail exchange with University of Alabama and UA Birmingham libraries - which was unusual, but cool. One of UA's digital projects librarians asked us about our ETD server, so I asked about how they managed their ETDs. It turns out that UA's setup is a little different than what I expected. I knew that UA had signed a deal with UMI Proquest to manage ETDs, but it turns out Proquest only manages the student submission and graduate school review processes. After the grad school approves a pdf, then Proquest adds the pdf to Proquest's ETD collection, and Proquest FTP's a copy to UA (or UAB) along with a metadata file. From there UA and UAB have processes to publish the pdf to their own digital collection servers.

Subject: Re: Thesis/Diss Repository - Spelling of my name
Hi Professor,

I just ran an update against the ETD server that standardizes the
advisor names for the theses already in the system:
  http://etd.auburn.edu/etd/browse?value=VAZSONYI,+ALEXANDER&type=author
Let me know if you spot any problems.

New incoming theses will introduce name variations depending
on what the students enter, so we'll go back and update the
data again every semester or so.
I also want to patch the server to allow a student to chose
his advisors from a list already in the database,
but it will take me a while to work that code up.

Cheers,
Reuben

--- Alexander Vazsonyi 12/13/2010 12:48 PM ---
Thanks Reuben - that sounds great.

Alex

____________________________________________


--- Reuben Pasquini 12/13/2010 10:15 AM ---
Hi Professor,

Thanks for reminding me about this problem.
I'll try to work out a solution over the next couple weeks -
have something in place before spring semester.

Cheers,
Reuben


--- "Alexander Vazsonyi"  12/12/2010 3:22 PM ---
Hi - 

I was wondering whether it would be possible to consolidate the 6
different variants of my name in the thesis/dissertation repository.

Here are the variants I readily found . . .  

Vaszonyi, Alex
Vazsonsy, Alexander
Vazsonyi, Alex T.
Vazsonyi, Alexander
Vazsonyi, Alexander T
Vazsonyi, Alexander T.

Thanks,

Alexander Vazsonyi

2010/12/6-9,13-16 - Goodbye 2010!

It's been a good couple weeks at the library. I managed to get a couple things done, and try a couple new things too. First, I helped Jack setup his new laptop with the Library Csharp code I wrote when I first started at the library. Jack wants to move away from writing VB6 code, and start up with .NET, so hopefully the Csharp code helps him out. We managed to install the code's dependencies, and build a few of the applications. We'll see how it goes.

Next, I setup a spreadsheet with Google Apps to illustrate how we could begin tracking library statistics online. I think I'm the only one excited about the idea, but I'll try to get something off the ground in 2011.

Kathie at the Honors College got in touch with me. It looks like we might have our first student submit a honors thesis to our new online collection. Hopefully that comes off without a hitch.

I did a little vufind work - adding a "collection" sub-facet under the "Digital Collections" location facet. Clint and I enabled full-collection browse by simply handling an empty search string as "*:*", and it works surprising well. I went back and patched the vufind import to setup a location facet for government documents, and to index online theses and dissertations as an ETD collection under the "Digital Collections" facet. A full Voyager import to vufind is running on devcat - hopefully that will finish in the next few days. Since I was working on the import tool, I went ahead and added a "delete records" tab to the GUI version.

Finally, today I spent some time setting up a script on Yahoo Pipes that merges several library RSS feeds into a unified feed. I think Clint and Tony like the idea of publishing a unified feed for the library; we'll see what happens.

I'm looking forward to two weeks off over the holiday break. I'll be back in a couple weeks.

2010/11/29-12/2 - all the little things

It was a good week for accomplishing little things. First, Clint and I wired up webcat (our Voyager Tomcat OPAC under development by Clint and Denise) with support for Auburn-ID authentication via the AuCataloging webapp.

Next, we rolled out some patches to the production vufind server that incorporate hierarchical call-number facets, an AUBIExpress link in the record detail view, and an updated "no results" page.

I added the libsharp code to littleware's google code project. Jack wants to move away from developing VB6 code, and move toward .NET - hopefully libsharp will ease his migration.

Finally, we interviewed the last two candidates for the systems department position. They were all good candidates.