For the second year in a row, attendees at INCOLSA's annual Board Meeting were treated first-hand to a demonstration of just how unpredictable networking technology can be. As in past years, INCOLSA gave Board members an option to attend the April 26, 2006 Board Meeting from any of four remote locations via video-conferencing technology. The technology offers remote attendees significant savings in travel time and costs, but of course only when it works.

As in the past, this year's Board Meeting was held at the Marten House Lilly Conference Center in Indianapolis, with four remote, satellite locations throughout the State. The plan was to provide two-way, real-time, Internet-based voice and video between each of the remote sites and Indianapolis. Unfortunately, once again, the Marten House's Internet connection was too unreliable to support working connections to the remote sites. As a result, INCOLSA had to resort to backup cell phone communication to get voting results from the remote sites, remote attendees were unable to see or hear speakers in Indianapolis, and Indianapolis attendees had to endure long delays as staff tried to work around the communications issues.

The American Association of Publishers (AAP) has sued Google over its digital library plans. The AAP, which includes McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, and John Wiley & Sons publishers, filed suit against Google last week, claiming that the Google Print digital library project will violate their copyrights. See this Guardian article for the details. The AAP lawsuit follows a previous law suit filed by the Author's Guild against Google on similar grounds.

Here is an interesting response from Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, that describes what Google is trying to accomplish with its Google Print project . . .

Read the full Schmidt article about why Google does not think their digital library project violates copyright law.

Yesterday morning, 9/21, we had a visit from Uri Livnat, Ex Libris 'Infrastructure Director'. Uri is visiting several US Ex Libris customer sites this week to share information about Ex Libris' new Aleph 'Monitor' product, and to get feedback from current Ex Libris customers about additional system monitoring capabilities that customers would like to have added to Monitor.

Of course, PALNI Staff developed their own own home-grown system monitoring system to automatically monitor various system resources and processes, log information about system problems, and notify staff via email and pager about serious problems. Uri's visit gave staff a chance to compare our own home-grown system to Ex Libris' commercial product offering in this area.

Speaking for myself, I was reasonably impressed with Uri's demo of Monitor. Their system seems capable of monitoring most of the things in Aleph that we are currently monitoring, though it does not monitor non-Aleph things like computer room temperature, power outages, and network problems, nor does it currently monitor OPAC response times like our own system. However, for Aleph-specific issues, just about everything we currently monitor seems covered, plus a number of other system status indicators that we are not monitoring at present. As with our home-grown system, Monitor can email and/or page us of any problems, and can maintain a system status log.

Once again, our backup generator saved us from some major problems. We lost power to the PALNI/INCOLSA Offices, including our computer room, at about 10:30am today, 8/5, and power was not restored for more than an hour. That's definitely longer than our Uninterruptible Power Supply would have been able to maintain things on battery backup power alone. If we'd lost power to the PALNI systems, PALNI Staff would no doubt still be working to recover from the problems, given given everything that was going on this morning with our Aleph upgrade.

Of course, we are now in the final stages of our Version 15 to 17 Aleph migration. This morning, Ex Libris was working to finish up applying the latest changes to our production database to the new Version 17 copy (i.e., applying the so-called Oracle "triggers"). We know from past experience that the Ex Libris conversion programs and scripts cannot be restarted if they get interrupted. They have to be re-run from the beginning, and that is a big problem if the conversion script takes a long time to run. For our Aleph upgrade, Ex Libris has been running some really long scripts that take a week or more to complete.