NEW PROJECTS

YEAR OF HUMANITIES AND ARTS (YoHA) WEB SITE - project number 10732

The Year of Humanities and Arts (YoHA) is intended to be an ambitious, inclusive program involving the many schools, institutes, and programs that make up the University of Michigan. YoHA, which will take place throughout the 1997-98 academic year, is being sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR). Support for YoHA is coming in from many units and offices. Centrally, the Office of the President and Office of the Vice President for University Relations have already made major financial commitments to support YoHA.

http://www.yoha.umich.edu/

Hillary Clinton's YoHA-sponsored visit to campus brought a lot of traffic to the YoHA site in April. There were over 30,000 requests, with the norm being between three and four thousand.

School of Information student Kendra Spiegel completed her YoHA DFE. Her main contribution is a new structure for the YoHA scrapbook, which will be fully implemented soon.

Current month server stats for YoHA are available at... http://www.engin.umich.edu/cache/stats/org-YoHA.html

April statistics for YoHA are summarized as follows:

Program started at Wed-Apr-29-1998 05:27 local time. Analyzed requests from Wed-Apr-01-1998 01:09 to Wed-Apr-29-1998 01:00 (28.0 days).

Total successful requests	34,255
Average successful requests per day	1,224
Total successful requests for pages	11,770
Total failed requests	356
Total redirected requests	7
Number of distinct files requested	312
Number of distinct hosts served	5,658
Total data transferred	458,495 kbytes
Average data transferred per day	16,378 kbytes

(JW)

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN INSTRUCTIONAL ENVIRONMENT (UMIE) - project number 10594

Course Home Page Builder (CHPB):

Work was finished on minor changes/fixes to CHPB for use in UMIE Expo for Dentistry and Pharmacy the last week of April and first week in May. Also incorporated were several new templates specifically created for Dentistry and Pharmacy as well as online user help documentation. Any suggestions for improvemnt to the CHPB from the UMIE Expo will be considered for the final version release.

Electronic Reserves:

Latest version available at http://wwwdev.oit.itd.umich.edu/projects/ereserves/cgi/zeta.cgi Ann Sprunger, Mike Nowak and Roger Espinosa met to review zeta.cgi version at the end of April, and finalize what AS needs done for the Enriching Scholarship seminars in mid-May.

Reserves is also going to have an open house with the department contacts at the end of May, which will be another opportunity to gather feedback about how folks fine the new CGI.

Course Catalog:

A revised version of the Course Catalog using a flat file was constructed for demonstration purposes during April. Data mapping the LS&A and Engineering course data into the M-Pathways structures has been difficult, and work on this continues. We received the report from the SI graduate students, which defined the current processes used and recommended necessary processes to easily fold the course data from the three schools and colleges they interviewed for their class project -- LS&A, SI, and Dentistry. These recommendations are being examined and will be implemented where appropriate.

Class Lists:

Programming for the emailing of class lists to the appropriate faculty members has been completed. Minor modifications need to be made to make this more publicly available.

UMIE Front Page:

Work on the UMIE Front Page was discussed and Zoe Gurevich has been assigned to develop an easy-to-use interface for faculty to use all the UMIE tools created thus far.
(KY)

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ON-LINE (UMOL) - project number 8064

Subscriber count, as of April 30:

Subscription type	# subscribers	increase from March
Maize or Blue package	1582
Custom or campus subscribers	763
Total	2345	+63

Note: In future months, we plan to collect data in a manner that will report subscriber churn.

Communication and Content:

April communications activities focused on promoting UM Online subscriptions to graduating students. A targeted email was sent to 5650 potential graduates one week prior to the end of the term. Other activities included participation in two events -- a three-day Union Senior Days, and a two-day Diag event hosted by the Alumni Association. During these events UM Online staff talked with, and distributed materials to, over 500 students. As a low-cost promotional material solution, letters describing the service along with a previously produced UM Online bookmark (promoting the URL) were used as handouts. The materials were designed to remind and encourage students to subscribe to UM Online via the online subscription form. The online form, deployed for December 1997 graduation, has generated over 200 applications.

In addition to staffing events, UM Online was promoted to Spring grads via ads in the Michigan Daily and on UM TV, posters in the campus computing sites, and letters included in graduation packets of seven school --s Education, Pharmacy, Law, Public Health, Business, Social Work, and Music. Materials were also placed in the ITD Accounts office, Rackham Student Services area and Dental School Student Services Office. UM Online staff continue to pursue relationships with the other schools and colleges with the goal of providing information about UM Online to all graduates before they leave campus.

We continue to add a steady stream of content to the UM Online site. Recent additions include WUOM commentaries, and lectures from the Coffee with Faculty series. In conjunction with the migration to the Web Services server, the site has been spruced up with navigation and design changes. The User Guide has been fully deployed online. This online deployment improves our ability to keep documentation current at all times.

As an outcome of the March presentation to the Development Council, we continue to make new contacts and meet with school and college Development and Alumni Officers. In general, the schools and colleges are interested in using UM Online as a vehicle for enhancing a sense of community with their alumni. As a first step, a few schools have chosen to sponsor UM Online subscriptions for their alumni boards. In meetings with the schools we talk about the development of intranets and the potential of offering online continuing education programs.

During April, there were 120 general information email contacts with UM Online subscribers and potential subscribers.

Infrastructure and Technical:

UM Online staff continue to participate in discussions regarding the development of an Alumni Online Directory. The sponsors' expectation regarding the incorporation of email re-direction as a requirement for phase one has resulted in the need to recalculate estimates for both the development and ongoing costs of providing an active directory with mail forwarding functionality.

The revised CD-ROM version of the UM Online Internet Access kit is being tested.

Owing to staff changes, the Alumni Association has withdrawn sponsorship for the stalled Alumni PC program.

With the delivery of the long-awaited Verisign certificate, the planned migration from standalone server to a customer of Web Services was completed in April.

Monthly statistics are available at http://www.umonline.umich.edu/stats/.

UM Online core team: Linda Green, Becky Spaly, Brian Vaughan, Ellen Vaughan (project leader)
Web support: Scott George
Technical writing: Susan Topol
(EV)

CIC BIG 10 JOINT PROJECT - project number 10439

There was little activity on this project in April. The next BTJP meeting is another joint meeting with the CIC Security Working Group to be held May 20-21 in Chicago.

BTJP - Big Ten Joint Project
CIC - Committee on Institutional Cooperation
ICAAP - InterCollegiate Authentication & Authorization Project
(KC)

CAMPUS WIDE DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM

THE FEDERATION: DIGITAL LIBRARY PRODUCTION SERVICES - project number 10450

The Federation projects are funded by ITD, University Library and the Media Union. A list of staff is online at http://www.umdl.umich.edu/dlps/who.html.

Overview

Funding and accounting appear to have been the dominant themes of the month. Two projects were funded by DLF (a meeting in Washington on the application of TEI to digital library projects, and a distributed finding aids proposal) and significant work was done on three grant proposals (the IMLS grant, the DLI-2, and the Michigan "MOA4" conversion project). At the same time, serious headway was made on refining estimates of cost for conversion, digitization, and creating online systems. Among the most significant accomplishments was the preparation and mounting of a significant number of collections in Image Services. Discussions were held in HTI regarding a process of moving toward a unified markup scheme -- an effort that will have significant impact on work in that area. Data on usage and collection sizes will be available by May 5th at http://www.umdl.umich.edu/dlps/stats/9804.html.

New and developing Projects

• Work continues with Early Canadiana Online (with the Canadian CIHM project). The metadata models are nearly complete, and materials are now being shipped to Toronto by Preservation Resources. An informal agreement now exists between DLPS and ECO for performing OCR. Preliminary OCR work should begin in May. Discussions continue on the applicability of the MOA software.
• The joint Michigan/Harvard distributed finding aid server proposal was funded by the Digital Library Federation.
• A letter of intent, based in significant part on current DLPS collections and architecture, was sent to NSF for the DLI-2.
• A meeting of library staff from Preservation, Cataloging, Systems, Collection Development, and DLPS was held to discuss a major project for conversion of several thousand volumes in Buhr. The support from library staff was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Work still continues on funding, but early responses have been positive.

Infrastructure

System Performance

• dlpdb.umdl (Oracle database server): no downtime
• dlps1.umdl (primary www for DLPS, and PEAK/MOA server): no downtime
• dlpind1.umdl (Image Services): no downtime
• dlps2.umdl (Reference): no downtime
• htiwww.umdl (HTI): no downtime

General Architecture

• Work continues on collecting cost data in order to provide more effective estimates of cost to potential "customers". A process of articulating those costs began this month: a very early draft of a (skeleton of a) brochure, and there was some further discussion of how those costs might be further refined.
• Met with Scott Dennis and Judy Avery of the Humanities team to create collection description key words to facilitate cross collection searching
• Began collecting and analyzing statistics on Web browser versions used to access DLPS collections. This should help in making informed design decisions about functionality and interface possibilities.

Staffing

• Interviews took place for a Special Projects Librarian. An offer should be tendered in early May.

CD-ROM Duplication Service and General Data Loading

• For PEAK: 33 CDs Received, 33 Loaded, 33 Split, 33 Indexed
• Duplicated 31 CDs for the ITD media duplication.
• Mastered 29 CDs for Image Services.
• Loaded 20 CDs for Image Services.

OCR, General

• Ran 10 CDs for American Verse OCR.
• No redos of OCR for Special Collections EAD conversion
• 10 CDs of OCR for MOA

General and Special Projects

Making of America

• Making of America was featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education "Information Technology Resources" column (April 3, 1998 p.A27)
• The PDF display option was redesigned to use a different conversion tool.
• Additions were made to the online FAQ.

PEAK/Elsevier

• Met to discuss compilation of statistics report for client institutions and drafted a statistics report template.
• At the request of Indiana University, further clarified language in email and on the web site around vPIN usage.
• The conversion to CPC format compression was completed. We now have approximately 85 Gb of free disk space.
• The handling of ISSN changes and titles which have been merged or discontinued was greatly enhanced.
• User list changes continue to drift in. Parke-Davis will require a major update during May because they have changed their e-mail address format.
• Progress on the improved bibliographic search continues. A PEAK standard DTD for describing the data was defined, and programs for generating data in this format from the various sources (the dataset.toc files and two different Elsevier SGML formats) were created. Programs for loading these files into OpenText, and for searching them and generating results in the PEAK internal format were also created.
• The final list of University of Michigan subscriptions was completed and installed.
• At least some printing problems were traced to installation problems with Netscape on Windows NT. These were fixed by reinstalling Netscape.
• Bad HTML code was removed from several of our pages.
• User services: Questions from users this month included: several cases of lost VPIN's, a couple of unusual problems with PDF printing, a problem with sorting results, a suggestion for an option to return to the results list after viewing an article, clarifications regarding bookmarking titles, and a question about an article missing part of its first page. The most unusual question this month was regarding the availability of computer code that is accessible to subscribers of certain print journals published by Elsevier. The most frequently asked question was regarding missing issues. General questions about access to PEAK and how to get a VPIN continued as well.
• Mackie-Mason and Lougee were presented further clarifying information on the recent all-PDF offer from Elsevier. Both felt that moving forward is desirable, but only if participating institutions indicate a strong desire and ability to support PDF for every user. Discussions with participating institutions will probably begin in early summer.

Dissertations Project

• No new activity on dissertations this month.

Registry & Gateway

• No new activity on Registry and Gateway this month.

Finding Aids/Encoded Archive Description (EAD)

• The distributed finding aids server proposal was funded by DLF. Work was done to revise the timeline.

Human Relations Area Files

• 6 subscribers were added in April, bringing the total to 51.

Bibliography of Asian Studies

• Production, mirror, and demonstration sites put in place, based on most current data. The demonstration will be available freely for the month of May, 1998, and will then be accessed by a rotating monthly password, generated at DLPS and disseminated by the BAS staff.
• The Quality Control and Revision interface for altering or deleting entries from the BAS database was improved to display for the authorized users the effect requested changes would have on sample entries.

SGML Server Program

• Discussions were held with DRDA and FinOps about future procedures and billing for SSP. Subsequently, letters went out to several institutions regarding renewal of SSP agreements. Two have already renewed, and two have indicated that paperwork is in process.
• The University of Pittsburgh indicated its intent to join the SGML Server Program.
• Yale's next five databases were installed. Development of the last, WING Short Title Catalogue, awaits documentation from Chadwyck-Healey.
• Wisconsin-Madison's six databases were fully delivered and installed.
• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's notices of license from Chadwyck-Healey arrived for their databases, and were given access from the SSP server.
• Continued to collect responses from participants in workshops. Currently, we have ten for the public service/text creation workshop and five for the programming workshop.
• Received valuable analysis of the personal collection interface from Yale's SSP participants, which will be implemented in the next collection brought online.

SGML Systems

• A small perl module for mimicking FTL (a umich-developed text search engine used by PEAK) behavior for PEAK was written. This module mediates between a program expecting FTL query language and results formats, and an OpenText SGML database underneath.
• A wide variety of string and fuzzy pattern-matching code examined and tested for use in MEC merging needs, with possible applicability to any OCR or data entry process that needs authoritative text matched with uncontrolled text from other sources.

Image Services

• A proposal was submitted to the Institute of Museum and Library Services for a 1998 National Leadership Grant. $208,622 were requested to extend and advance Image Services. Proposed are services to the Museum of Art, Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, and from off-campus, the George Eastman House, Fowler Museum of Cultural History - UCLA, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.
• Digitization of Kelsey Museum amulets (approximately 400 objects) is complete. Searching is functional, though the interface needs revision.
• Three boxes of papyri were digitized, plus two large pieces (eight feet and four feet long).
• The transfer of archived papyrus images from tape to CD is complete.
• The Bentley Historical Library delivered 1000 of their most requested photographs (4x5 inch copy negatives) for digitization. The images will be loaded for online access.
• Poetry Here and Then materials have been returned to the Bentley Historical Library (digitization is complete).
• 14,000 digital images are being transferred from the Museum of Art. Approximately 1,400 are done. The images and text catalog will be made accessible for the Museum's evaluation.
• Permission for extended use of Museum Educational Site Licensing data has been given by George Eastman House, Fowler Museum of Cultural History - UCLA, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. The National Museum of American Art, Harvard University Art Museums, and Library of Congress have expressed interest in granting extensions, though formalization is pending. There has not yet been response from the National Gallery of Art.

Humanities Text Initiative

• Analyzed text structures of Early English Prose Fiction and tested various iterations of the interface as development progressed.
• Completed unified display and rendering for American Verse, Middle English, and the two Modern English collections.
• Revised and enhanced Riverside Shakespeare, released to production, and announced availability to University librarians.
• Contacted 14 English Dept. faculty about using HTI collections in some way in fall classes. Have received 9 positive responses.
• Began work on a better word wheel for the Old English Corpus; the current implementation can bog down Macintosh browsers when the list of choices is extremely long.
• Made adjustments to the Compendium web pages and improved HyperBibliography filtering.
• Revised HyperBibliography DTD (version 1.8).
• Met with staff from programming, interface design, and image services to discuss the implications of mapping the variety of current collection DTDs to one master DTD. Alternative scenarios for initiating progress were discussed.
• Prepared very abbreviated, XML-compliant version of the TEILite DTD for use by conversion firms.
• Examined early English materials UMI sent for conversion and prepared guidelines for conversion bureau.

Middle English Compendium

• Summary:
  • Routine production of new hyperBibliography material continues. Basic processing of these materials into working hyperBib entries continues to become quicker; it is currently running about a week or so ahead of schedule (with almost three, as opposed to the scheduled two, batches completed in April).
  • The troublesome e-MED "S" files have had their final gaps closed with re-keyboarded pages and have been processed to a useable state: everything is completed except the final regularization of bibliographic notation (being done as time allows) and perhaps the resolution of inappropriate hyphens in a few files.
  • Newly keyboarded material from Apex has arrived on or close to schedule, and has been sampled and checked as it arrives: the "O" data, despite a fluky problem with the coding of one character, was otherwise of excellent quality (roughly half the specified error rate).
  • In general, we have been able in April to meet the e-MED production schedule created in January and February: the e-MED "S" files had to wait for their missing pages to catch up with them, and are thus about a week behind schedule, but the "N" and "O" files have been taken a third of the way toward completion, two weeks ahead of schedule.
  • With the creation of routines to deal with current MED production (volumes U- ), and greater cooperation between MEC and MED on coding issues, future MED files should enter the e-MED very quickly and with minimal effort, in most cases before the print version appears.
  • April also saw the creation of policies and timetables for providing scholarly access to the MEC in 1998 and 1999. MEC will be appearing in the next University of Michigan Press catalogue, and additional advertising is under way.
  • MEC staff met to discuss plans for the Kalamazoo Medieval Studies Conference early in May, and to review presentation drafts. Formal presentation of the MEC project at Kalamazoo will presage a new period for MEC: public access and beta-testing leading to paid subscription.

• Preparatory work on the MEC this month has included:
  • Continuing improvements in previously created routines, processing scripts, documentation, etc., especially the scripts used in the "tidying" stage of e-MED processing.
  • Creation and documentation of a process to convert data generated by current MED production data to a form consistent with other e-MED data.
  • Continuing experimentation with methods to identify unique stencils automatically, as well as testing of manual methods of associating stencils, in order to facilitate the eventual merger of e-MED and hyperBibliography.
  • Implementation of certain changes in the SGML dtd for the hyperBibliography, including a new ability to italicize text where it could not be italicized before, and to provide full bibliographic tagging of works cited in the notes.

• MEC Production this month has included:
  • Completion of primary (pre-review) processing on hyperBibliography batches S1 and S2 (stage 8).
  • Continuing review of hyperBibliography batches L1-L3 (stages 10-11)
  • Beginning of processing of hyperBib batch S3 (to stage 4)
  • Processing of e-MED bundles S7-S18 to the fourth stage past compliance with the e-MED's TEI-based dtd (i.e., all stages except bibliographic regularization; S1-S6 were done in March).
  • 5% sample-testing of all of the keyboarded data for the e-MED "O" volume, as well as thirteen additional pages that had been discovered missing from "S".
  • Bundling of the e-MED "O" data into files O1-O4, corresponding to the print fascicles O1-O4; insertion of the missing "S" pages into the appropriate places in the "S" files.
  • Completion of all processing including bibliographic regularization and error-correction, on e-MED bundles U1-U3, the most recent current MED-production files.
  • Processing of e-MED bundles N1-N3 and O1-O4 to the second stage past compliance with the e-MED dtd (the "tidying" stage).
  • Beginning of bibliographic regularization applied to all 18 bundles of the e-MED "S" volume.
  • Application of improved "tidying" scripts (developed in March for the e-MED "S" volume and in April for the e-MED "U" volume) to the previously completed "P," "R," and "T" volumes in order to assure consistency across the e-MED's files.

• Note on "stages": the "stages" referred to in the MEC progress reports are those defined by the e-MED processing-steps guide, the hyperBibliography prcoecessing guide, and the e-MED and hyperBibliography progress charts, all accessible at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pfs/med/mec.html

Miscellaneous

Visitors, discussions and presentations

• Lougee and Price-Wilkin attended CNI and offered a talk titled "Moving Digital Libraries from Project to Production".
• Shigeo Sugimoto, University of Library and Information Science, Japan, April 2
• Susan Jeannero, Cisco, April 16
• Ohio Preservation Council
• Naoki Onishi, Osaka University, April 23
• Christiaan van der Wath, Pretoria Information Partnership, April 28
• Lougee and Price-Wilkin met with Library Residents to discuss the Digital Library Initiatives.

Intralibrary Cooperation

• Work continues on articulating an architecture for University Reserves online. The model that includes components from UMIE and DLPS was presented by Tuckett to the Electronic Reserves Group.
• Engineering staff were trained in the use (and modification) of a shell script for iterating over a collection of 600dpi page images to generate PDF and GIF images for the online reserves service.
• Discussions continue with Dionne and other library staff about support for numeric data.

Miscellaneous

• Staff met with Pacific Data Conversion Corporation, a firm that may provide some cost-effective outsourcing in several areas, including imaging.
• Price-Wilkin attended the spring meeting of the Digital Library Federation Technical Architecture Committee (this time held in Ithaca, NY). Fruitful discussions were held with Carl Lagoze and DIENST staff concerning the evolving DLF metadata and architectural models. Other committee members provided feedback on the MOA2 white paper. Further discussion was had on Making of America 3 (MOA3), a plan to bring together previously converted digital Americana, with a "rescue" of XDOD materials.
• Discussions were had with Cornell regarding MOA1 and the continuing possibility of interoperability, as well as contract OCR work. The OCR question will be resolved in May.
• Lougee and Price-Wilkin were asked to talk and demonstrate DLPS systems at the Marshall Symposium.

MUSEUM EDUCATIONAL SITE LICENSE (MESL) PROJECT - project number 10019

http://mesl.itd.umich.edu/

MESL is largely in production mode. The current project ends in June, and Wendy Lougee has contacted each of the museums requesting an extension for at least a year.

Results thus far --

• George Eastman House: willing to extend at no cost. Also interested in possibly sending us more images.
• Houston Museum of Fine Art: Interested in a no-cost extension for for access for another year.
• National Gallery of Art: checking with lawyers.
• Library of Congress: checking with legal advisor.
• Fowler Museum: offering us no-cost extension for a year.
• Harvard: not able to extend use at this time. Interested in talking again in the fall.
• National Museum of American Art: willing to provide year's extension at modest cost. No new content, however.

All museum content with agreed-upon extended use will be migrated to Digital Library Production Services, Image Services, and deployed in the new system by July 1, 1998.

April statistics for MESL are summarized as follows:

Program started at Mon-04-May-1998 14:17 local time. Analyzed requests from Wed-01-Apr-1998 07:04 to Thu-30-Apr-1998 12:37 (29.2 days).

Total completed requests	2,319
Total failed requests	5
Average requests per day	89
Number of distinct files requested	868
Number of distinct hosts served	91
Number of new hosts served in last 7 days	24
Total bytes transferred	19,731,510
Average bytes transferred per day	674 998

Downtime for ezekiel.rs.itd.umich.edu -- 0

MESL ITD Team: John Weise, Zoe Gurevich, Katarina Lukaszewicz, Sandy Colombo
(JW)

CORE JOURNALS PROJECT - project number 10013/T0002

The Core Journals project is a partnership with UMI deploying around 1000 core journal titles in all disciplines in image format, linking them with Wilson Indexes in MIRLYN and putting in place the necessary structure for printing, accounting, and billing.

April 1998 Core Journal Statistics
Total Articles Requested	8338
Total Successful Prints	8136
Total Pages Printed	XXXX
Average Article size (pages)	XXXX
Total Unsuccessful attempts	XXXX

INFORMATION SERVICES

CONFER U & COW - project number 10047

The Confer U production service

April Downtime: Reboot following the confer2.itd.umich.edu (Confer U server) system software upgrade on Apr 1 -- under 3 minutes.

STATISTICS
	Jan'97		Nov'97	Dec'97	Jan'98	Feb'98	Mar'98	Apr'98
Total Conferences	304		68	75	57	44	44	36
Total Participants	11,310		6,660	6,733	6,837	2,300	2,300	1,316

Migration to COW (pilot project)

Some COW Statistics:

Prof. Erik Rabkin has initiated a process of COW re-evaluation. On April 23, we (Erik Rabkin, Gavin Eadie, Sandy Colombo, Teri Adams, Louis King, Dave Winkel, and Zoe Gurevich) have decided we need to identify and eliminate COW's shortcomings/weaknesses; to improve some of the COW features; to make the COW interface "less complicated" (if possible) and easier to understand by an inexperienced user.

A small group (Gavin Eadie, Tom Knox, Dave Winkel, and Zoe Gurevich) had a first working meeting on Apr 28.

April Downtime: COW was down for about 45 minutes, from 1:45am to 2:30am on Apr 13 -- scheduled downtime for a minor upgrade on the server.

Confer U & COW Team: Dave Winkel, Doug Heavrin-Brown, Linda Green, Scott George, and Zoe Gurevich.
(ZG)

WOLVERINE ACCESS - project number 9889

The data for the mini FAQ is now complete. This was designed to allow students to view answers to common access questions, and will help them in contacting the appropriate department. A Perl script is under construction that will allow easy update to the mini FAQ. This should be completed and in place for the students by the end of May. We are adopting the Knowledge Base concept to improve response time and communication to the student population.

The Wolverine Access Server Statistics are available at http://www.umich.edu/~waccess/stats/

(MP)

TRANSCRIPT ORDER ENTRY SYSTEM (STUTOES) - project number B9831

A draft copy of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) between Wolverine Access (WA) and the Office of the Registrar was sent to John Gohsman this month. General WA support was outlined to list what components of the system WA team have control over and can support. The Student Area and Operations Management (OM) will need to cover what they handle. A new Lotus Notes Database was developed this month to house all WA system documentation in addition to Student Area trouble table rotation problems. Team leader in the Student Area reported that the new LN database is much easier to use than the ROSCOE member they were using. Now they can view and sort history data easily. The Office of the Registrar staff can also enter office procedures on TOES. Discussion on how office procedures can be entered into the system will be covered in May. The WA team leader will follow up by transferring the information to DocLib on the Lotus Notes database as to what it is called and what it contains.
(MP)

WEB INTERFACE FOR STUDENT U-M PHONE BILLS (STUTEL1) - project number B9959

Beta testing has occurred. The customer requested changes to the look of the screens. They would like to see heading columns in the data just as you would expect to see in a report. This change has caused a delay in completing the project in April. The change should completed in May and ready for customer signoff. It is anticipated that this project will be in production by late May and the black border closed. No other phases have been identified.
(MP)

DATA ACCESS INFRASTRUCTURE - project number 10899

Only one of the production GQL diagrams (HR) remains to be completed for the migration. The developer has been working with the customer to roll out a completely new diagram, which is now being tested by the user office. Derived date fields have caused the delays with the HR diagram but this has been resolved. The DAC diagram was saved to the database and is now in production. Some customers have called to indicate they are having problems getting the auto update feature to work on their machines. This is not the norm and will be dealt with on an individual basis. A copy of the diagram for the Mac version is yet to be uploaded to IFS. This has been reported and is being resolved.
(MP)

TUITION ATTRIBUTION CROSS-LISTED COURSE DATA - project number A9178

The diagram was saved to the database to complete the GQL production migration deadline of April 6th. The documentation of the program to load data into the Oracle database is scheduled to move in early May. This will complete the project. A request to close the project A9178 will be sent to the customer in May.
(MP)

BUDGET MODEL - project number A9181

A move to the test server Kiwi from Osprey delayed testing of the Attribution Model. Because of an incompatibility between the two C-compilers we have experience problems with compiling the load scripts on Kiwi. We delayed sending out the security forms to the customers until we can get data moved to Kiwi for testing. The developer implementing create-table scripts discovered major typos in the table and field names causing yet another delay in completing the Source and Use tables. After careful examination by Data Administration and the developer, all typo corrections have been made. The developer is waiting for table size information from the customer. If we do not get a response by early May, the developer will use a default value. The development team is still waiting for specifications to create derived table data in Source and Use tables. This information must come from the customer. The development team received test data for only one table. They are still waiting for the rest of the test data to cover the last modules, Source and Use. The customer is currently working on data dictionary definitions for Source and Use data. Dictionary items for Tuition Attribution have been completed and given to Data Administration for implementation.
(MP)

GROUP E-MAIL SERVICES

The "Group E-mail Services" include REQ, LISTstar, Targeted E-mail, and Classlists.

Project Coordinator: Kari Gluski

REQ - project number 10051

REQ addresses the idea of a "Group Mailbox." This month we began working on plans to contact users and begin piloting the Cyrus server shared mailbox alternative. Neda Gholizadeh has begun a medical leave but is still responding to current REQ user's requests for updates to their groups. Katarina Lucaszewicz is the member of the UMCE Operations group with primary responsibility for the current REQ machine. Jim Sweeton has been asked to take on coordination of the new service and has agreed to do so once his current Listserver evaluation is completed.

Three or four members of the Doclib staff are testing use of the Cyrus server's shared mailboxes with the IMAP support in Windows Eudora 4. They have a weekly assignment of one person answering mail and close to a 'touch it, own it' policy for handling mail to the group so POP might actually work for them. The main drawback of not using Pine is the difficulty of accessing IFS for archiving of mail if the group wants to keep copies.

Kari Gluski met with the Housing office. They are beginning their busiest season of the year and had counted on REQ being available to them until their slower time after September. The Cyrus server may actually meet their needs better, but one of their crucial requirements before they could migrate is for an auto-reply acknowledging the receipt of the person's message. They said they have users who are so impatient that before they had REQ, people used to send a second message after an hour or so demanding to know why they hadn't heard back from the first one yet. We need to investigate whether there is any way to use vacation or parochial or some other standard tool to provide this for them with Cyrus. They would be willing to pay part of the programming time to set it up, if they have to. They don't care about having a tracking number.

We are still investigating the ARS/Remedy software already licensed by the NOC, however, the Accounts Office thinks the Cyrus server might meet their needs, at least initially. Liz Sweet, Dave Morse and Kari Gluski met to discuss internal ITD uses for ARS 4/24. Liz and Dave will work together to get a service order begun so work can proceed to define her area's requirements.

Next Steps

• The target is still to have REQ shut down by July 1 after running the Cyrus shared mailboxes in parallel for a month or more.
• We will not move old mail from REQ for users but will provide a script that can copy their files into IFS for them. There the contents can be viewed, printed, etc. as files.
• Results of the 'survey' need to be shared with service users as promised.
• Operational arrangements for the new service should be completed.
• Charging mechanisms for the $400/yr. need to be clarified (just check on set up of SUB).
• Additional test groups need to be moved so feasibility of the Cyrus shared mailboxes can be verified with more users
• Users have several client options -- decision tree to document when to choose which ones would be helpful.

LISTstar (Listserver product) - project number 10592

Jim Sweeton has installed a Lyris test server. The purchasing bureaucracy involved in getting a free copy of ListProc from CREN was excessive so that is on hold. Lyris appears to be the most capable of the options (the other was LISTSERV); it costs $4000 to license but that is a 1-time charge with all future upgrades included. Features that make administering lists less labor-intensive would make the license worth it for the reduced operating costs.

Next Steps

• The target is to migrate to a new server platform by July 1 or earlier.
• Identify and document any user-visible changes from selected product
• Notify users of migration plans
• Jim will be available .50 FTE this year and next for testing, migration, and supporting future service growth.
• Charging mechanisms for the individual or departmental users (not class lists, which will be covered in infrastructure) need to be clarified.

TARGETED E-MAIL - project number 10044

Damian Egeh, Sharon Smith, and Kari Gluski met with Sandy about departmental mailing lists in X.500 April 24. Agreed to continue status quo (Sharon uses best judgment about when it is reasonable to make this kind of group) and policy, pricing will be clarified as work on related service changes is completed.

The service has not begun charging but as of 4/21 everything was in place to do so, except for a policy on fixed-price accounts. Gloria Thiele has been asked for advice but has been out of town.

Next Steps

• Complete addition of uniqname error-checking
• Work on efficiency improvements (now planned with move to shared server with Listserver since may be easy to do there with small sendmail changes)

CLASS LIST - project number 10901

Work on a web interface for faculty requests and an automatic process to create various types of class lists continues. A test interface is available and additional error-handling and testing is being done. It looks good.

Where will this project fit next FY?

Next Steps

• Plan to test the automated web tools to process faculty requests for class lists in Spring or Summer for final large-scale deployment by Fall.
• Once we have picked a listserver product, develop a process to create and delete class e-mail lists (for privacy reasons).

MEDIA CONVERSION - project number 10004

No report submitted.
(TV)

U-M GATEWAY - project number 10014

14 new entries were added in the Gateway catalog this month.

News items were updated on a weekly basis.

Gateway email continued at the new rate -- 257 items in Becky's April GW-mail folder. (250+, rather than 200, seems to be our average since January. We'll see how it goes for the summer.)

There was no downtime on the production servers this month. Traffic to the servers averaged 1.3M hits/day, with a increase in departmental site traffic, exceeding personal space in number of requests.

Web Production Services (#11182):

Detailed information on production Web server configuration and statistics can be found at http://www.umich.edu/admin/.

Kevin is developing a platform to support secure credit-card transactions, a general calendar program, and Nursing's person-to-person Intranet functionality.

The following departments are using our eXtended CGI (XCGI) development space:

Brian is continuing work on RealAudio usage logging. The following departments are using our RealAudio service:

• School of Music
• Academic Outreach
• Business School
• U-M Online

Detailed information on production Web server configuration and statistics can be found at http://www.umich.edu/admin/.

WEB Statistics
Month	#Requests	#bytes	#hosts
April '98	39,244,969	482,842,000,000	1,186,519
March '98	43,269,428	562,826,000,000	1,397,258
February '98	39,306,839	500,152,000,000	1,369,004
January '98	44,224,703	564,978,000,000	1,421,379
December '97	35,845,639	412,084,000,000	1,083,893
November '97	40,298,091	443,271,000,000	1,263,023
October '97	38,728,218	453,687,000,000	1,214,015
September '97	32,966,652	379,847,000,000	989,069
August '97	26,041,042	402,853,000,000	879,697
July '97	23,809,743	336,930,000,000	840,724
June '97	24,719,653	371,159,000,000	885,560
May '97	25,344,926	451,719,000,000	987,880
April '97	29,127,665	503,439,000,000	1,037,846
March '97	28,982,975	526,444,000,000	1,023,042
February '97	25,235,434	505,740,000,000	963,613
January '97	31,910,670	543,198,000,000	1,008,447
December '96	27,231,105	539,371,000,000	936,470
November '96	27,148,553	557,387,000,000	975,816
October '96	26,524,215	545,485,000,000	948,786
September '96	19,600,827	382,286,000,000	734,210
August '96	17,509,927	350,465,000,000	691,707
July '96	16,958,757	327,815,168,000	681,536

(CK)

DEPARTMENTAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS

CUSTOMER CREDIT CARD BILLING (Financial Operations Area) - project number 9768

Kasthuri tested CRCARD and UMCECB1 applications on the new kiwi server.

ITD TRAINING REGISTRATION SYSTEM - project number 9948

There are some additions/changes to be made. When the Developer2000 patch is receiver from Oracle, this application will be migrated to Developer2000.

DRDA/PRISM - project number 8992

Kasthuri and Cornelius are working on an automated system to periodically update PRISM profiles using HR data from the mainframe. The customer has approved the proposed plan and the mainframe programmer has started working on the mainframe end of things. The GQL diagram and the Oracle Forms applications have been upgraded to Developer2000. Bugs were discovered on our latest version of Developer2000 and bug fixes to the application will need to be completed once the patch is received.

Analyzed Index and table space allocations on the kiwi server for Prism project. Then wrote script to drop all primary key and foreign key relationship indexes, and recreated them with efficient space allocations.

DRDA/BEST MI - project number 8027

Cornelius has been working on the CoS program which will dump data from our database to the CoS database. Work on the Oracle Text server has been halted momentarily awaiting the completion of the CoS program. The GQL diagram and the Oracle Forms applications have been upgraded to Developer2000. Bug fixes to the application will need to be done as soon as the Developer2000 patch from Oracle comes.

REGENTS - project number 8861

Analyzed Index and table space allocations on the kiwi server, and recreated with efficient space allocations.

CUSTOMER BILLING PROFILE SYSTEM - project number 8777

no activity

SOCIETY FOR RESEARCH IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT(SRCD) - project number 10456

Gail completed a "formal test", from which we have a few little things to fix. Discussing new additions and three reports.

SCHOOL OF EDUCATION (SOE) Project - project number A8166

Ray contacted the Customer Relations Manager for this area to open discussions about providing development support to the school in areas of their application not provided by MPathways.

NICOTINE RESEARCH LAB - project number B8961

Gail provided ongoing consulting and software pieces. Looking at ways to integrate separate parts of their study subject processes. Investigating software for the telephone screening process.

BMC (BioMedical Communications) - project number 8139

This application is in production. Gail is making requested changes as they begin to really use the reports. There is an ongoing data-loss problem that may be network related; awaiting network diagnosis help. Beginning work on adding the Video department.

TIMEKEEPING PROJECT - project number 6996

Our role on this project has been completed.

ACCESS PROJECTS --

B8868 --Clinical Scholars Project

First phase of work has been completed.

B8998 - Urology Surgery Database Project

Work continued on table restructure and completion of data entry forms.

B9987 - School of Public Health

Review of proposed work is in progress due to the need to add to the original development request. This is also expected to impact the estimate for cost and time of completion.

Business School Database - (Time billed directly to customer)

Provided consulting services on existing database. Provided support to query data and how to FTP data to other database applications.

8804 - CCGC, Cancer Center Geriatric Center

Completed the required data structures and the data entry forms. Some of the standard reports were completed. The initial system was demonstrated to the customer, who was very pleased with the progress to date. Genotyping was discussed as the next major part of the application. Also discussed were the difficulties in automating this phase of the project.

8798 - Prostate/Pathology Database

Work continues on gaining access to the required tables and evaluation of how these tables are structured compared to other prostrate databases within the hospital.
(RUG)

WEB SERVICES

[ read in /afs/umich.edu/group/itd/pddirap/Work/websvcs9804.html here ]

Completed Projects:

Departmental Projects:

ITD Support Projects:

Web Services provides assistance on several ITD projects. Currently, we have staff working on the following:

Contract Prospects:

Marketing:

This month's WWW SIG group meeting was held on on 4/16. Jeremy and Bret presented what they found interesting at the JavaOne conference. The final meeting of this year will be held on May 21. Topic still to be determined.

We are evaluating new names for the XCGI service, which we feel is too cryptic to much of our potential audience.

Product Support and Evaluation:

RealMedia - purchase is complete, and the new server is in testing. This server is available to campus groups for testing streaming broadcast applications. Contact Brian Vaughan for more information. We are working with Ellen Vaughan and Becky Spaly to determine how best to migrate the encoding service under Web Services for campus-wide availability.

Brian installed and began testing of video capture equipment. Recorded and Encoded the web sig as a sample real media project. Met with the Quicktime group to discuss intended use on campus, and desired features, since Apple wants to go after the same market. Began communications with UMTV about the possibility of working together on real media projects, and taking advantage of each other's strengths. We will be meeting with Thomas Bray for an overview of their system and their long term plan.

WebObjects - Jeremy, Melody, and Kasthuri are all attending the WebObjects class the first week of May.

Hans has documented his CGI libraries for common use. Documenton can be found online at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hmasing/web_architecture/

Dave is working with a computing support staff member at the Business School to port the Web authentication cookie server code to Windows NT. This will be useful to many folks around campus.

(CK)

INFRASTRUCTURE

LAN/NOS SERVICES AND GROUPWARE - project numbers 10140 & 10058

The Groupware and LAN/NOS services are now working together. April was a fact-finding month, spent on understanding what GroupWare is, what current resources we have in staff and equipment, and sorting through the billing and budget issues for GroupWare and LAN/NOS services. There is now a rough draft of the business plan, and edits continue.

Several meetings were held with the staff and outside units in April to determine what we can offer and what the community needs and expects from GroupWare products and LAN/NOS services. The Training Department is reviewing training materials on GroupWare products from outside vendors.

Offering a stable production environment for GroupWare products such as Lotus Notes has been our focus this month. We have hired a Lotus Notes system administrator to help in backup procedures and have purchased and installed a new Lotus Notes server. We expect to quadruple the disk space capacity on each of the three LN machines (Development, Mail and Production). With a completed Business Plan by June 1st, we will have identified the directions of GroupWare and LAN/NOS services and be in a position to identify staffing needs.
(MP)

NOVELL INFRASTRUCTURE - project number 10891

NOVELL PRODUCTION SERVICES - project number 10896

BANYAN VINES - project number 10895

WINDOWS NT - project number 10893

(ML)

PRINTING & SAMBA - project number

(CB,WC)

EMAIL (IMAP) - project number

Preparation for upgrading the servers to IMAP4, writing and testing code --

• quota handling
• tools
• ported imapd to UMCE environment -- added kerberos authentication, added kpop, rewrote the mail delivery software

(WC)

SMTP - project number

(AI,WC)

USENET - project number

(AI,BV)

IDENTIFICATION, AUTHENTICATION, AND AUTHORIZATION (IAA) - Project 10618

The UMCE IAA service is responsible for the UMCE uniqname service, UMICH.EDU Kerberos authentication service, and UMCE protection group (authorization) service. The Kerberos database contains ids and passwords for over 170,000 users.

A new uniqname client program, with a typical Windows GUI interface, has been developed for Windows 95 and Windows NT workstations. The NewUniq program allows uniqname administrators to create new uniqnames. NewUniq was released in April to departmental uniqname administrators. More information on NewUniq.

The effort continued to eliminate vulnerable computer passwords, part of an ongoing campaign to increase security of U-M's computer networks and data. We are assisting the ITD Office of Policy Development and Education by checking passwords for the UMICH.EDU Kerberos cell. These are the passwords that most U-M faculty, students, and staff use to access their email, use for dialin access, and use to access IFS files. During Winter term, passwords were checked, and passwords that could be recognized by a dictionary check were identified. Owners of these passwords were instructed to change their password.

Currently the UMICH.EDU Kerberos server only supports Kerberos Version 4 applications. In order to support Kerberos Version 5 applications, such as Oracle, we have started a project to migrate the Kerberos server to one that will support both Kerberos Version 4 and Version 5 applications. During April, CITI migrated their AFS Kerberos Version 4 server to the MIT Kerberos Version 5 server. This was a small-scale version of the migration we are planning for the UMICH.EDU realm, and it went very well. We have started to add code to the uniqname server to add uniqnames to the MIT Kerberos Version 5 database when uniqnames are created. Existing applications, such as the Macintosh AFS translators, are being tested in the new environmant.

We had performance problems at the beginning of the Winter term (slow file access, slow logins, etc.) during periods of peak usage. Software changes have been made to improve performance, and several server machines will be upgraded to faster processors as soon as possible. The new hardware is being tested, and the production IAA services will be migrated to the new machines when testing is completed.
(MG)

IFS - project number 10620

The Institutional File Service (IFS) provides a distributed file system based on Transarc's Andrew File System (AFS). Students, faculty, and staff store files in IFS home directories. There are currently over 85,000 IFS home directories and the IFS stores over 406 billion bytes of data.

The Transarc AFS client for NT workstations has been made availiable from ITD software licensing. The AFS client for NT is a good, vendor-supported software product that makes IFS accessible to Intel machines. Transarc released a new version (patch 8) of the client during April. Information on how to obtain and install the NT client.

The IFS team is migrating the eighteen AFS file servers to the latest version (3.4a) of Transarc's AFS software and to the latest version (4.2) of the AIX operating system. During April, several of our AFS file servers were upgraded to the new version of AFS. Two new file server machines have been ordered. With the new file servers, the IFS storage capacity will be increased by over 100 billion bytes of data (from 500 billion to over 600 billion bytes).
(MG)

ACCOUNTING AND BILLING SYSTEM (ABS) - project number 10619

Upgraded to new system --

• better hardware (particularly the disk sub-system)
• new Operating System (AIX 3.2.5 --> AIX 4.2)
• new version of Oracle (7.0.16 --> 7.3.3)

Handled mid-month increase to BCP Printing Allocation, from 120 pages to 300 pages.

Preparation for Spring/Summer 98 and Orientation.

Current concentration is on further tuning of new system now that it is experiencing production-level load.
(BD)

ONLINE DIRECTORY SERVICE - project number 10082

The purpose of the Online Directory Services team is to further the mission of U-M's Information Technology Division by deploying a set of high performance, large-scale, standards-based on-line directories that integrate various technologies and University business processes into services that are relevant to campus computing users.

Delivering accurate directory information to its users on a timely basis is the fundamental mission of a good directory service.

General Information:

Members of the Online Directory Team continue to work with the Office of Development to plan the implementation of an online Alumni directory service.

Work continues on our CGI-based LDAP client. We plan to have a fully-functioning client with more-or-less complete user interface design and documentation sometime in May for delivery to the team that will build the Internet Access Kits.

We are participating in an on-going discussion about how to determine UMCE Basic Computing Package eligibility and manage UMCE BCP account lifetimes. Part of our improvements to the monthly update process hinge on the outcome of the BCP eligibility discussion. This discussion will also drive part of our data quality improvement effort.

We said good-bye to Steve Rothwell this month, who has taken a position with former ITD employees Kevin Bosley and Mike Alexander at ArborText. We wish him the best.

Usage:

New Features:

Technical Achievements:

The current directory server software

With the help of ex-ITD employee Tim Howes, we were able to reconstruct the proper referral server configuration this month. This allows our customers to use LDAP clients to search transparently other X.500 servers around the world

A new version of one of our administrative tools was created this month that contains several important bug fixes. The new version will become available for directory administrators very soon.

Netscape Directory Server 3.0

Other directory technologies

• Solstice Directory Server
• Oracle LDAP
• Netscape Directory Server 3.0

And, the latest release of the ISODE enterprise directory server is now available for us try. This is a combination LDAP and X.500 server. We have the keycodes to decrypt the distribution, so we can begin evaluating it soon.

E-mail: Directory.Services@umich.edu
(EV,CL)

General Purpose Computing Cycles