Universita' degli studi di Udine - sistema bibliotecario d'Ateneo

Institution name: Library contact person: Automation contact person: Aleph configuration: Functions implemented:

Major developments since last ICAU meeting:

During the last year our University System was reorganized and new library services were created: Departmental and Interdepartmental Library Centres, the first to manage the bibliographic material of a single Department, the latter derived from the merging of the libraries of already existing or newly founded Departments.The birth of these new centres, in place of the (23) previous Institute/Departmental libraries, called for a segmentation of our database in sublibraries: sometimes two of the former sublibraries became one centre, responsible for the whole process of the management and acquisition of bibliographic material, in other cases the entities responsible for expenses increased. In fact, even though bibliographic material was combined in a single centre to be managed according to similar criteria, Departments still are autonomous financially as regards acquisition, inventory and payment of their books. In short, our Library System is now made of 3 Interdepartmental Library Centres (one of them is the result of the unification of ten of the former Institute/Departmental libraries) and some other Departmental Library Centres which, of course, are of reduced dimension; finally there is a University Library Centre for the coordination of the System and for professional training.

This situation obviously encouraged the process of standardization of library procedures and simplified the central catalogue management, but, as regards administrative-accounting aspects, it required a very complex and difficult configuration. In fact, the number of sublibraries needed to support this new structure is about forty, with different vendors, budgets, acquisition procedures and inventories. In spite of the inconveniences caused by this reorganisation, since October 1994 all of the centres adopted the Acquisition module which was not currently used by everybody.

The database now consits of about 63.000 records and the remote user can reach it by the following methods:

The planned enlargement of the University Library System to support other town libraries is proceeding very slowly: at the moment the most important town cultural service (The Municipal Library) still remains just a point of search (the University installed some terminals there to allow users to access the ALEPH System) and continues using a different information support base for its bibliographic material. Meanwhile, the Library of CISM (International Centre for Mechanical Sciences) sanctioned its adhesion to the University Library System.

Major developments planned

Antonio Cunei

Lately the MicroVax performance was unacceptable; therefore following Ex-Libris' directions, we recently purchased a Sun SPARCserver 1000E to move our existing VAX-based Aleph archive to UNIX. The UNIX release of Aleph has been ordered, and we're currently waiting for the media. The installation, which will be performed by Atlantis, is planned for the beginning of September. In the mean time, we are configuring the new machine, and checking its capabilities. As said, it's a Sun SPARCserver 1000E, dual processor, 192MB RAM and 4 SCSI, 1 GB hard drives. Included are also a DAT unit (actually DDS) which should allow 5GB to be packed on a single 90m cassette, and a CD-ROM unit.

Included as well are several CD-ROMs containing Solaris 2.4 and the on-line manuals, demos of various products, and a really interesting tool named "Online: DiskSuite 3.0". It allows advanced disk managing options, as disk mirroring (duplications of data, to prevent service interruption even in case of HD hardware failure), striping, logging and, which is more attractive, the ability of performing on-line backups. The temporary configuration we made on the disks is: root, /usr, aleph data, aleph docu, and aleph binaries partitions (everything duplicated), plus a scratch area. We tried to optimize write load for each drive as well as minimize heads movements. Unfortunately we are not currently able to evaluate possible performance improvements or degrade using this kind of configuration. What is sure is that we are now able to perform a total on-line backup bringing down the system for as little as a few minutes.

From the software viewpoint, we installed on the machine, waiting for Aleph, the "bash" shell, Elm, Emacs, gcc, gzip/gunzip, less, and sendmail 8.6.12 (much needed, since we don't plan to use neither NIS nor NIS+, and the m4 configuration macros are not included in Sun's distribution). Next in our to-list is Lynx, and several other minor system enhancement.

In two months we hope to start a project for the card catalogues conversion by typing in ALEPH at least some data of the card catalogue. The project will be accomplished also by external staff.

Open problems

A few weeks before the arrival of a new server with a UNIX system, while this report was being compiled, we received news (an e-mail message sent by Barbara Rad-el, transmitted by a colleague to other Italian users) of the release of a Open VMS version. We cannot conceal our disappointement
  1. as for how we learned of this (why were not all the users formally advised?)
  2. for the contradictions and changes in a commercial policy which might act as a heavy discriminatory factor.
Our University was ready and willing to provide for the higher costs and troubles of a conversion which was formally favoured during the last Meeting, and now we find out that we could have easily remained the way we were without all the cost!

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