IRAP June 1996 Status Report
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN INSTRUCTIONAL ENVIRONMENT (UMIE)
The UMIE proposal group was expanded to include LS&A representative Heidi Weise. The project proposal is nearing final draft and will be distributed to respective units and directors on 7/19/96. (SC)
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ON-LINE (UMOL)
Marketing/Communication: Two UMOL core team members presented an overview of UMOL at an Alumni Association sponsored meeting for 40 school and college alumni relations representatives. Promotional materials for various audiences such as recent alumni and parents, as well as general brochures are under development. Planning for fall promotion activities are also underway.
U-M Online will be featured in the July issue of the IT Digest.
In conjunction with the new student Orientation program, U-M Online application materials are offered to parents who are alumni.
Infrastructure /Content: Team members participated in discussions with representatives from Progressive Network, via a technical briefing held in Chicago and during the campus visit of the Sales and Service vice president. In conjunction with WUOM, UMOL is testing two hours a day of live programming delivered via Real Audio. Mechanically the testing has gone well. Offering live broadcasts requires a staff member to physically monitor a dedicated serving computer during the broadcast. In order to provide a production Real Audio offering with available resources (staff and equipment) for the near term, offerings will be limited to archival material since delivery of archival material is not as resource intensive. WUOM has a large archive collection that will serve as the source for the Real Audio offerings.
The UMOL pilot program will terminate August 1. Pilot users received letters and email thanking them for there help and inviting them to join as paying subscribers. Responses from pilot users indicate dissatisfaction with our pricing . In messages to the pilot coordinator, a number of participants have indicated a willingness to pay up to $25 dollars per month , but feel 10 hours of connect time is inadequate. The core team is investigating options and strategies that would enable UMOL to increase the number of hours included in the basic in-state offering. The impact of offering significantly different in-state and out-of-state pricing will be reviewed.
National dial in via ADP/ CREN Autonet is currently being tested for both UMCE and UMOL subscribers. Since the highest service speed available is 14.4, response time feels slow in comparison to other services. In order to offer higher speed connections, other options are being explored. A project scoping meeting was held on June 10 with IBM to discuss using their Advantis network to provide both national and international dial in service. Technical representatives from IBM, Merit and ITD attended. The next round of discussions, scheduled for June 27, will involve IBM and Merit representatives.
To upgrade to the current software kit, UMOL will provide PC subscribers a customized version of FTP Inc.'s OnNet Explorer 2.0 which supports Windows 95, NT, as well as the currently supported Windows 3.1. Timing for the customization and delivery of the product is tied to the conclusion of license discussions between ITD and FTP Inc. which are under way.
The current iteration of the UMOL business plan is available. At the recommendation of Jeff Tibbs and Brian Moynihan, the business plan was sent to Nancy Heaton, Senior Tax Coordinator . The project leader and PAM then met with Nancy, John Stuart, Corporate Tax Manager, and Patrick Lilley, Senior Tax Coordinator to review unrelated business income tax (UBIT) issues with respect to UMOL. There is an IRS established set of criteria for determining UBIT status. Tax advisors preliminary conclusion is that UMOL does not fit the criteria of an unrelated business of the University. The deciding factor : the service's relation to the expressed purpose of the organization. In the case of UMOL, it means providing unique exclusive content that is related to the University's exempt purpose. It was suggested that the following be asked as a rhetorical question in determining the appropriateness of content for the UMOL secure web space. "How does the information provided relate to the University's exempt purpose?"
In the course of the meeting recommendations for record were made. A follow up meeting will be held that will include a representative from the office of the General Council.
UMOL core team: Content: Carrie Edlund Marketing: Linda Green Technical: Brain Vaughan Project Leader: Ellen Vaughan (EV)
This week training for Development staff was offered on the front-end (EIS) portion of the DAC Reporting system. The canned query subgroup has requested data modeling from Data Administration for a summary table(s) to simplify query-building and improve performance. The load of both rounds of data is now being accomplished each weekend without incident. Work on data training and GQL training is also in progress. Enhancements to the dataset will continue next fiscal year. (PB)
CAMPUS WIDE DIGITAL LIBRARY PROGRAM
THE FEDERATION
Detailed planning for the collaborative operation of services among the Digital Library, the media Union, and ITD is underway. (SC)
MUSEUM EDUCATIONAL SITE LICENSE (MESL) PROJECT
The MESL implementation is part of our overall digital library development effort which is a collaborative undertaking of the Information Technology Division, the School of Information, and the University Library. This report focuses on the MESL effort in ITD.
http://mesl.itd.umich.edu/
Distribution: Distribution has been in full swing for most of June. Digital images, accompanying text documents, and structured text records for each image have been received from the Library of Congress, National Gallery of Art, National Museum of American Art, and George Eastman House. Each museum submitted images and data for approximately 500 museum objects. In its quality assurance role, Michigan checked the integrity of the structured data files. Problems were reported back to the museums. Museums fixed problems and resubmitted data. It often takes several rounds with each museum to get the data straight. The structured text data is now available for pick-up via FTP by other MESL universities and museums that will implement the data at their sites. Images and accompanying texts will be distributed on CD-ROM. The CD's are being generated now, and the first batch will go out in the next week or so.
The following museums are still working on their data and will submit it to Michigan as soon as possible: Harvard University Art Museums, UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
The distribution process is going much more smoothly than it did last summer. This is because we have already developed the tools and processes needed to handle the job. The museums learned a lot the first distribution as well, and know better how to prepare their data. In the first distribution, there was no quality assurance process. Problems discovery and correction happened informally, after the data was distributed. Museums were supposed to follow certain guidelines, but the data wasn't checked before distribution. This created a lot of extra work for each implementing institution. This year implementors should experience far fewer problems.
Publicity: In late May, there were two MESL open houses for faculty. One in the DIAD Lab of the Shapiro Library, and the second in the Art and Architecture Library computer lab. About ten faculty attended, and another 5 expressed interest through e-mail. This is considered a success. To date, 5 faculty have used MESL with classes. The open house effort was managed by Sharon Heminger from the library.
Web System: Improvements are continually being made to the UM MESL web interface. Development is done on a development server and new changes are not public yet. Improvements include new graphics, new introductory (home) pages, totally new searching interface (keyword entry by field with Boolean option), sorting of results, text list of all results, new browsing interface (hip matrix of terms), and more.
Data from the current distribution will be added to the system in the next month or so. By the end of the summer, MESL content will double and will include approximately 7000 museum objects from 7 museums.
Two 9 GB disks are being purchased to accommodate the new data. One disk for each of the production and development servers.
Zoe Gurevich will be putting 40% of her time into learning about Web security and developing necessary skills to implement security on Web servers. MESL is in need of a way to limit access within the umich.edu domain, and is looking to kerberos authentication and what has been learned by Wolverine Access and other projects for answers.
Faculty Support: John Weise met with Professor Joanne Leonard of the School of Art and Design to demo MESL and discuss possibilities for use. She is excited about the potential but is concerned that the content will not meet her needs. She will explore the MESL web system further.
MESL Consortium Meeting: In May, John Weise and Mike Miller (Director of Library Services for the Media Union) attended the MESL Consortium Meeting at American University in Washington, D.C. Meeting notes are available at http://www.ahip.getty.edu/mesl/about/docs/mtgs/9605day1.html.
John reported on distribution costs to date. Distribution has cost considerably more than originally estimated. The Getty AHIP foundation has agreed to provide additional funds to cover unanticipated costs for fiscal year 1995-1996 and 1996-1997. The MESL Management Committee said the report is the best they've seen of its kind and they expressed their appreciation for our effort.
The MESL production server had 4974 requests in May 1996.
MESL ITD Team: Zoe Gurevich, Gail Lift, Sean Sweda, Andrew Inman, John Weise (JW)
Statistics not provided this month. (NG)
Data Access GQL diagrams for all datasets are currently being updated to include functionality for the "split model" (which enables users to save and maintain their own queries separately from the central predefined ones), for accessing the online data dictionary, and for enabling users to terminate their own "runaway" queries. In addition, the following work is being done on each dataset. The Financial Tables Change Group is in the process of rolling out Service Unit Billing, the source/use data, and a set of predefined queries. A subgroup of payroll group members have been working on a one-time forum to be held on July 10. Completion of all payroll dataset-related tasks is still targeted for June 30. The Official Third Week Count O3WC dataset continues to be rolled out in a staged fashion. At the same time some final changes are being applied to a second dataset on the development server, and feedback from a telephone survey conducted in June is being evaluated. The dynamic student data training handout and data dictionary are currently being reviewed. Staff in the RO have completed validation testing and are developing a core set of predefined queries. New indexes have been built to facilitate performance. Usability testing will be conducted during July. Funding has been secured for finishing up this round of data early next fiscal year. Testing of the backloaded Human Resource data continues slowly (user vacations, etc. are making this difficult). This effort will continue a few months into the next fiscal year. Performance seems to be improving with cost-based optimization, which is now being tested in the subgroup. CRAS training continues to be offered once a term. In the procurement subgroup work continues on the data refresh, training, predefined queries, and tuning. All work is still slated for completion this fiscal year. As noted last month, the Data Availability Plan (DAPC) is on hiatus until plans for the evolution of the U-M data warehouse in light of PeopleSoft implementation become clearer. Negotiations are underway to schedule a meeting of DAPC representatives with the Core Process Management Team (perhaps as early as late July). Work on the access/compliance application continues. The ITD "TechDev" group met for the last time in its current incarnation this month. This group will be reconstituted next fiscal year to monitor the proposed new GQL annual upgrade process on campus at the very least. Articles on the new and/or enhanced Data Access datasets are to be briefly reviewed in the July 8 issue of the ITDigest. A larger feature article will be included in the September 9 issue that focuses on the status of the entire data warehouse to date. In addition, a demonstration/presentation at the FORUM for Administrative Computing is being planned for September 19 at the Michigan Union. (PB)
GOPHERBLUE
GopherBlue Migration: Contact has been made to all the gopherblue information providers to discuss their migration needs. Meetings were held with Personnel and Student Employment to discuss authorization/authentication issues. A user group meeting was held to pull the providers together to discuss security issues and share other migration concerns. The meeting was well attended and we received favorable feedback.
Rackham continues to work on their gopher to web conversion on their own with little help from our office at this time. (CE)
GopherBlue Statistics: There were GOpherBLUE 30,729 client sessions over the period 05/21/95 to 06/20/95. Total gopher calls for the period were 478,474. Total Gopher file accesses for the period were 379,814. The most accessed Gopher resources were...
| X.500 | 165,610 | (43.60%) |
| Ann Arbor Jobnet | 105,000 | (27.65%) |
| All Others | 109,204 |
(BV)
WWW version of Wolverine Access: The MANDSRVP, COURSEAVAIL, DIVISIONLIST, and COURSELIST programs still need to be updated to convert to the SRVTAB process. The ADDRESS transaction still needs to be modified to include the correct mail address for billing address inquiries. The mainframe 'Bag' routines still need to be changed in production to permanently correct the NULL value problem. Little, if no, progress has been made on the system program documentation - additional staff resources are being arranged. The new Windows version (3.0) of America On Line has been tested with the Wolverine Access system and was found to work. We will update our user documentation in July. The kinks have been worked out of our web server statistical process. We now have stats back to November for our web server and the Mandarin server. We hope to productionize our stats process in July. The URL for our stats data is http://smasher.rs.itd.umich.edu/stats/. Our stats follow...
| Transaction | mainframe | web | mandarin approx. | web % |
| Schedule (probes 1 & 2) | 13104 | 14867 | 718 | 95% |
| Grades (probes 3 & 4) | 12861 | 14489 | 1390 | 91% |
| addresses (probe 5, 6, & 9) | 4782 | 5797 | 491 | 92% |
| CRISPinfo (probe 7) | 30472 | 29779 | 559 | 98% |
| CRISPappt (probe 11) | 507 | 771 | 83 | 90% |
| Student Accounts (probes 13 & 14) | 3157 | 3782 | 685 | 85% |
| Academic Report (probe 15) | 3017 | 4552 | 742 | 86% |
| Disbursed Aid (probe 16) | 1610 | 1996 | 436 | 82% |
Student transcript: Phase 1.2 - (Add UMID security features) has been moved to production and Phase 1.3 - ( Add transcript and academic report print features - (SPRINT/RPPRINT)) coding is scheduled to begin July 1. Coding and testing is scheduled to be completed by the end of July.
Met with representatives from RO to review and approve system architecture proposal. A July 3 meeting is scheduled to discuss system design and timeline. Attendees will be Yu Lin-Kriz, Cheri Elert, and Barb Serri.
ID Card process: The TENTSSN program needs to be documented. Little work was done on the UNAMEUPD program this month.
Office of Financial Aid: All SAM databases have been cloned and tested. All modifications requested by OFA have been completed and tested by ITD. Users are currently doing testing. So far, the users state that all the data looks fine. Minor changes to the program specifications need to be updated to reflect the additional requested changes by OFA. Waiting for OFA approval to move to production. (CE)
We had 4 active projects w/active black borders during the course of the month:
Michigan Statewide Strategic Initiative (MSSI)> Bret, Maureen: Developed prototype web pages (including graphic design elements) for demonstration.
U-M Library> Maureen: Made some revisions to Mirlyn graphic design elements based on client feedback.
U-M Online> Susan: continued adding information to site, and investigated conferencing packages (w/Bret). URL: http://www.umonline.umich.edu/
CC372 - Sport and Daily Life in the Roman Empire (Classics)> Jeremy: Phase 1 complete and well received. Phase 2 set to begin before the end of July and be completed before September. URL: http://www.umich.edu/~classics/cc372/ (select Sibyl Assignments)
In addition, the following departments have contacted us for assistance:
Center for Great Lakes and Aquatic Sciences - contacted us for assistance w/Web site development.
Psychology - Followup meeting about Web-based subject pool application scheduled for 7/2.
Purchasing - Met with Purchasing and the Fisher Scientific Systems Group to discuss their new Intranet requisition system. Mainframe data feeds may need to be modified and connections to the uniquename server and the X500 server will need to be made. Requirements gathering continues.
Middle Eastern Studies - We have received a Mac-based version of their simulation that we will look at to see about adapting for Web use.
UMMA - Bret will be attending a training session on 6/30 about kiosk/public access use of their collection database, in preparation for assisting them. (CK)
A technical meeting to discuss the metadata collection and search capabilities was held with David Richtmyer. We are investigating FTL, Harvest, and similar technologies for this use.
The Gateway info provider/steering committee meeting is scheduled for July 8. Representatives of University Relations, News & Info Services, LS&A, Medical Center, Engineering, Development, among others, have been invited.
Carol completed changes to the last section of the Gateway policy written by Wendy Lougee. Wendy will incorporate these changes and distribute to U-Relations, etc. for review. In addition, administrative work continues. This month, we linked 15 new resources to the Gateway pages and also added them to the searchable catalog.
The personal server experienced significant downtime this month due to an extreme load generated by a specific user. That user was notified and the material removed. We are also investigating alternatives for handling Web statistics; the files are getting too large for the current disk drive.
Gateway statistics for May are not yet available, however, we suspect a significant increase in utilization. (BV)
| WEB Statistics | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Month | #Requests | #bytes | #hosts |
| May '96 | 16,384,379 | 301,180,928,000 | 666,458 |
| April '96 | 17,703,051 | 313,972,736,000 | 717,833 |
| March '96 | 10,425,708 | 190,923,997,222 | 418,413 *** |
| February '96 | 15,049,074 | 261,847,066,608 | 646,586 |
| January '96 | 18,732,664 | 358,545,339,089 | 665,008 |
| December '95 | 13,364,094 | 258,992,419,569 | 536,452 |
| November '95 | 9,749,451 | 164,247,027,634 | 451,228 |
| October '95 | 10,669,671 | 160,181,841,690 | 460,183 |
| September '95 | 8,132,234 | 111,872,064,548 | 357,320 |
| August '95 | 8,240,662 | 113,630,055,110 | 306,982 |
| July '95 | 11,000,000* | 174,360,700,000* | n/a |
| June '95 | 4,903,622 | 92,222,208,007 | n/a |
*** It was determined that the data file for March 96 was corrupted, information for March 96 is incorrect. (Gordon Good)
OTHER:
Departmental Systems & Services (DSS): Reassignment of all the DSS jobs has been completed accept for two internal DSS job numbers (0340 & 0209) which still need to be taken care of. Both have an account number of 952450. Many jobs, programs, filenames, etc. need to be reassigned before job 0209 can be closed. More research needs to be completed before job 0340 can be closed. (CE)
Contract Projects
IRAP One-Time Data Delivery Services: Received 1 new request this month. This now leaves us with a total of 12 external jobs and 6 internal jobs currently in progress. (CE)
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