Danmarks Tekniske Videncenter & Bibliotek (DTV)

Institution name: Managers Superusers and system librarians and manager (contact persons) System configuration

Resume of the past years' activities (July 95)

DTV implemented ALEPH version 3.2-5 as a BETA version in January 1995 and the released 3.2-5 version in June 1995. In January 1995 the Center also changed from VMS to UNIX (OSF/1) and from VAX to ALPHA. The library's OPAC, ALIS, is slowly shifting emphasis from being a mere library catalog to becoming a broader technical information resource. Tables of contents and bibliographic descriptions of articles from about 2500 periodical titles, most of which are held by the library or the institutes of the university, have been uploaded as an ALIS (ALEPH) database. The database is continuously updated by importing SwetsScan data from the Dutch serials agent Swets.This expansion of the OPAC concept will be followed by uploading the INSPEC files as database and finally the UDC Master Reference File (MRF). Uploading (parts of) Science Scitation Index is furthermore under consideration. The OPAC will also be expanded with locally developed databases of solved reference problems to help staff or users with their search activities.

The access to the OPAC is also changing as the WWW gateway to ALEPH has been offered for some time and is becoming more and more popular although it is still a pilot service lacking some OPAC functionalities. On campus, DTV has taken the initiative to build a CWIS (Campus Wide Information System) and in this context we see ALIS as the central search tool for all publication-type documents whether in paper or electronic form, whether archived at DTV or at some institute server.

The installation of 75 powerful PCs has facilitated the staff use of new information tools such as WWW, FTP, email and eased the in-house communication by using networked disk drives for viewing of reports, minutes from meetings, calendars, etc. In general, it has contributed to making the connection between the OPAC, external information resources and internal information resources relatively seamless. 25 PCs are installed in a completely new classroom used for especially INTERNET-related training courses. PCs are replacing terminals as the main tool of access in the library.

Some other projects

Open problems for Version 3.2-5 at DTV

Performance

When we shifted to OSF/1 January 1995, we started to have big problems concerning performance. The problem increased rapidly during the weeks. Performance was bad for all moduls and all functions. We tried to look at the configurations of the unix computer as a start and changed af few things here, but it didn't help much. Then we looked at ALEPH and found out, that the journaling files increased and were copied every 20th second (we are not using standard Aleph backup, which at least at VMS deletes the journaling files each time).

We decided to take out the journaling function, which is not a good solution. We hope Aleph will come up with a better way to handle this problem without having the risk of loosing the transactions of a day.

F_symbols

All jobs or processes started through Aleph use f_symbols. These symbols are not automatically deleted and often this messes up the current user's programs and batchjobs.

Dead processes

Aleph doesn't log out all processes, some of them are still using a lot of CPU and this slow down the system. We have two ways of handling this problem: 1) a special program, which "kills" these processes in TMPDIR every half hour and 2) we boot the computer every morning.

Year 2000

We have already experienced the need to use an expiry date for year 2000 or later. How and when will Aleph handle the year 2000 problem?

Development activities with Aleph Yissum

The work has been entirely focussed at enhancing the system with client/server facilities. Three parallel offerings are underway:
  1. ALEPH protocol server talking to ALEPH PC client with a GUI.
  2. WWW protocol server talking to any WWW client (Mosaic, Netscape, etc.)
  3. Z39.50 protocol server talking to any Z39.50 client (or to the Aleph client through the Aleph to Z39.50 gateway, or to any WWW client through a WWW to Z39.50 gateway).
DTV is active in the development of options 2 and 3.

The WWW server is in its final stage of polish and we hope to release a production version before the ICAU meeting. This will have support for all OPAC functionality including, user details and online ordering. The URL is http://www.dtv.dk/alis/.

The Z39.50 server is running in in-house test, and we hope to release news to the ICAU list about global test access in a couple of months. For those that prefer ISO SR (OSI), the server can be configured to run on an OSI stack rather than on TCP/IP directly.

We plan to start tests of the ALEPH protocol server and client in the fall, and see the ALEPH client as future standard software on staff PCs.

Together with Ex Libris and Aleph Yissum we are partners in a major EU Libraries Programme proposal, called UNIVERSE, which is about implementing virtual union catalogs. If the proposal is accepted, we will utilize and further enhance our experiences with WWW and Z39.50 as well as build up new experience in implementing UNICODE, UNIMARC and on- the-fly de-duplication, all to the benefit of new ALEPH versions.

Other ALEPH related development activities

In the EU Libraries Project COPINET, which is about implementing and evaluating charging and billing systems on open networks (i.e. WWW), we will use ALEPH as the retrieval system for the INSPEC database with links to a full-text server holding the corresponding IEE journals and proceedings.
Back to Update Reports menu
Back to main ICAU '95 menu