Tri-State University officially changed its name to "Trine University" last week, on August 1. For details about their name change, see

PALNI staff use system monitoring software to monitor and automatically log whether our Ex Libris Aleph system is online and operational at 15-minute intervals throughout the day. If the PALNI system is down for any reason, an "on-call" member of the PALNI staff is automatically paged so that any problem can be resolved quickly.

We have completed a review of our system monitor system log file for the 2007 calendar year. It shows that we experienced a total of 8.5 hours of unplanned Aleph system downtime during 2007. In addition, we scheduled a total of 9.25 hours of planned downtime over the 12 months for Aleph Service Pack installations and for other routine planned system maintenance activities.

As the Aleph downtime table shows, staff kept the PALNI system online and operational for over 99.9% of the approximately 8600 scheduled hours of PALNI system operation during the 2007 calendar! That is a significant achievement for a complex system like PALNI's that is routinely kept online on virtually a 24 hrs x 7 days per week basis.

Ex Libris just announced a new President of their North America operations. Here is the text of their press release:

The INCOLSA Resource Sharing Task Force 'White Paper' and report,

On Wed., April 11, 2007, the Ball State University Libraries will sponsor a one-day seminar, “Digital Trek: To boldly explore copyright in teaching and learning"

Today’s library and information professionals must know how to properly use another person’s intellectual property. Learn more about the TEACH Act, Fair Use, library copying, and participate in a case study via small group. We'll have time for questions with a panel of experts and more. By attending this conference, you will hear from nationally-known experts in the field. Registration by Feb. 14 is $65 (a sweetheart of a deal!), then increases to $80 per person. After April 1, the cost is $125. IHETS members' fee is $65 before Feb. 14, then increases to $80.

 For more information, visit http://www.bsu.edu/library/conference/copyright or contact Fritz Dolak at (765) 285-5330 or FDolak@bsu.edu

Featured speakers:

Kenneth Crews, J.D., Samuel R. Rosen II Professor in the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis and in the IU School of Library and Information Science and Associate Dean of the Faculties for Copyright Management

Donna L. Ferullo, J.D., Director of the University Copyright Office at Purdue University

Dwayne K. Buttler, J.D., Professor, Evelyn J. Schneider Endowed Chair for Scholarly Communication at the University of Louisville, University Libraries

Michelle L. Cooper, J.D., practices in the areas of employment and intellectual property law; prosecutes copyright and trademark applications, negotiates and drafts licensing agreements and handles infringement litigation.

Carl Johnson, Director of the University Copyright Licensing Office, Brigham Young University

James R. Williams, J.D., attorney at DeFur Voran LLP and is Ball State University's leagl counsel for education law

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Susan Akers

Here is the email that was distributed this afternoon, 12/22, on some of the Ex Libris listserv's about the acquisition of Endeavor Informations Systems by Francisco Partners, and the merger of Endeavor and Ex Libris. An FAQ document with more details is also attached (click on the attachment link at the bottom of the article).

An FAQ document from Ex Libris is attached that includes more information about what is happening. Also, see the July 26, 2006 posting to this web site, Ex Libris to be Acquired by Francisco Partners, for more information on the company that has now acquired and is merging both Ex Libris and Endeavor.

Use of the PALNI Online Catalog hit record levels in October, 2006. Across all PALNI library OPACs, 9,882 unique visitors connected to the PALNI OPAC a total of 30,309 times during the month of October. Overall, these users retrieved 762,318 web pages and generated 1,325,619 hits against the OPAC web server during the month. Over the past 6 months, users have visited PALNI's OPAC web sites almost 120,000 times and displayed more than 2.8 million web pages

For the month of October, 2006, the PALNI OPAC was searched 154,116 times by keyword. The following chart shows the number of keyword searches for each library for the month of October.

A week has now gone by since our recent Aleph configuration changes and system upgrades, and PALNI OPAC performance continues to be very good. Over the past 7 days, between September 21 and September 27, keyword search response time has averaged 1.07 seconds for 40,431 keyword search across all PALNI libraries. That is a big improvement from an average of 3.54 seconds for the week of September 9 through September 15.

Individually, all libraries experienced immediate and significant improvements in response time when the system changes were implemented. For example, the following chart shows detailed, library-by-library response time data for 9/21 to 9/27, immediately after the recent system changes:

To show just how much things have improved, the next chart shows library-by-library response time data from before the system changes:

The PALNI libraries that were experiencing the most serious OPAC performance problems are seeing dramatic improvements in response time. For example, average keyword search times for Huntington University improved from almost 8 seconds before the changes to just over 1 second following the system changes. Similarly, Marian College improved from over 7 seconds to under 1 second, Butler University improved from about 6.7 seconds to under 1 second, and DePauw University improved from over 4.5 seconds to just over 1 second on average. Also note that all PALNI libraries are now well under the 3 second average keyword search response time that our contract with Ex Libris calls for.

Based on these results, and given that the system changes do not seem to have caused any new problems, it seems safe to conclude that PALNI's OPAC response time issues have been resolved at last! Staff will let Ex Libris know about the changes that we have made, since that information may be useful to other Aleph system users who are experiencing similar OPAC response time problems.

Staff implemented a new enhancement to the PALNI New Titles List this week. With this version of the New Titles List, you may limit the list of new titles that are displayed to any of eight broad subject categories. The subject classification for each new title is based on the title's LC or Dewey call number.

To use this capability, the user can select the subject category from the "Subject Area" drop down list near the top of the New Titles List web page. All of the limiting, sorting, a search options from the previous version continue to be available in this version:

For those who may not have already discovered it, the PALNI Online Union Catalog can now be searched, along with the various INSPIRE databases, through a new web portal to INSPIRE. The new INSPIRE database portal was developed using software from WebFeat, Inc., and is currently being tested on the INSPIRE web site. Click on the "Try the New INSPIREsearch" link near the top of the page.

Using the new INSPIRE web interface, users can search the PALNI Online Catalog, various other library catalogs, and any of the INSPIRE databases. The new INSPIRE portal's broadcast search capability allows the user either to search an individual database, or to run their search in parallel across many databases all at the same time.

For example, using the new INSPIRE search interface, you may search the PALNI OPAC, OCLC WorldCat, and the Indiana Shared Library Catalog (ISLC) system, all at the same time and in parallel. Similarly, the user can do a keyword search against the PALNI Union Catalog, GoogleScholar, and Ebsco's Academic Search Elite, also all in parallel.

INCOLSA's two Internet Service Providers, IHETS and ENA, informed us on Wednesday that their engineers will be at INCOLSA on Friday, 6/2, to re-configure our Internet connections. If there are no surprises, they plan to switch most of INCOLSA's Internet traffic to a new DS-3 Internet connection through ENA, while leaving the connection to IHETS exclusively for PALNI use. The network changes are necessary so that INCOLSA can retain its Internet E-Rate discount.

We have asked ENA and IHETS to make the switch-over as transparent as possible. However, we still expect to see a brief interruption (e.g., less that 15 to 20 minutes) in Internet service to PALNI, INCOLSA, and INSPIRE at the point in time when they begin routing traffic through ENA. This may temporarily affect network access to both the PALNI systems (e.g., Aleph, SFX, MetaLib, ContentDM, etc.) and our web sites (PALNI OPAC, helpdesk, etc.). Unfortunately, we will not know until tomorrow morning exactly when the physical network switch-over will occur, but we'll try to give PALNI library staff as much advance warning as possible.

Once completed, this change will mean an increase in our overall network bandwidth, to more than 45 Mbps. More importantly, it will give INCOLSA, PALNI, and INSPIRE two redundant connections to the Internet through two independent Internet Service Providers. If for any reason either of the two Internet connections fails, we will have another, independent network connection that we can switch over to. Over time, this should give us both better overall network performance and improved reliability.