1. What's Bugging you? (Voyager General Roundtable)
Kurt Wagner, William Paterson University New Jersey wagnerk@wpunj.edu
1. Judy – Malloy College – Ritz customer – downtime – communication problem – private concern –
responses from “cloud team” – who are they?
Alan Manifold, Ex Libris – growing number of hosted sites, growing pains. Talked already internally
about outages, make sure that when any of our hosted systems go down, we react quickly and well.
Cloud Services Team (who react to outages) reacted very quickly, started working on rebuilding
systems, all working, really hard, remarkable piece of work. We in Support getting lots of calls, we
don’t know what’s going on – because they were all out working on the problem. Must react quickly
and well – including communicating quickly and well. Somebody needs to do that and we need to
be prepared for that. What exact servers were down, especially if they could bring them up on 5 min
– but still better to tell all as a heads-up, and let people know when they know more. Support needs
to be in on it Cloud Services – have not kept track of whom to notify – know where theyne3ed to
make improvements. Since then, a whole lot of work putting together contact lists, have a plan in
place for quick communication and continually update people.
Summary: They are aware and are working to make solid plans and procedures for communication
about hosted service downtimes.
Laura Guy, Colorado School of Mines: Suggestion: Would like to see a welcome message with guide
lines for the protocol. Should we wait to get back to work – started as soon as it came up, and then
it went down again and a lot of work was lost.
Janet Lute, Princeton University: Not just Voyager, but other services as well. Not sure what to
expect in circumstances.
Alan: On Voyager-hosted list. Someone posts “We’re down” – a couple me toos, and everyone
assumes it’s everyone, but there are actually 8-10 servers, so it may not be you too. It’s been very
challenging, with the multiple server locations in multiple countries – many people, need their e-
mail addresses, but working on it.
2. Natalie Wadley, UMDNJ New Jersey: Back up of test server. Who has moved to Linux?
Laura Guy has, but she is not local.
Chris Bennett, Cornell University: The University wants 80% of servers on campus virtualized by the
end of the year. They are moving as much as possible to Linux. It’s like trading your Honda in for a
Lincoln: they both have steering wheels. Much the same functionality, robust, fully-functional, no
difference to users.
Yu-Hung Lin, UMDNJ: Could you elaborate?
Chris: Looking at main constraining factor for us – RAM (memory) 8 GB per M– financial decision.
Things observed: things generally run fasters on Linux VM than Sun machines. Previous Sun-to-Sun
machines, dropped in speed. Some processes slower due to slower clock speed. Will reverse on new
Intel machines. Don’t accept lower specs than Ex Libris tells you.

2. Lori Fuller, Corning Museum of Glass: We want to batch load JSTOR records and to merge them
with print records – can it be done as a batch?
Alan: Meredith and Amy are fabulous, giving great advice, submit an incident report.
3. Laura Guy: Who is running Voyager 8? (Ithaca College – the only one in the room) Very smooth for
users. Laura Guy loves global changes.
Alan – throw away all customizations and reapply from higher. Maybe 15% of people do that, just
figure it will work, and mostly it does, but a handful of customers don’t. Voyager 8 – no help at all.
You must start from version 8 files – no change list. It’s just too big. Be prepared, use preview server
– will be back up tomorrow.
4. Ken Herrold, Hamilton College: Want more feedback from Chicago Voyager group – esprit de corps
and openness very good. Brainstorming, bitch session, idea session, very productive, has its own
frustrations – a real watershed change breakthrough. Hope to have more outreach and feedback.
5. Alan on Alma: Hosted. A product to make things easier. Voyager and Aleph got very complicated
over the years – Alma will be simpler. Changes – less staff, less money, more electronic. New things
we can do. Workflow issues. Report writing. Link resolver and ERM and ILS none of them talk to
each other – silos. Alma is backend, fulfillment, metadata, acquisitions, still need front end. 5
partner releases, a core, then more built on each previous, have not seen all functionality yet. 5
soon, on-site training, but much more functionality will be seen. Not just testing, using test bed with
only own data – full data load. Staff searching – very different from front end searching. Need
different indexes. Screen layout. Metadata editor. Navigation. Record linkages. Back office back
office -- sysadmin. Prototype. Staff search has been improved, and more coming in PR5. MARC
editor. Every single subfield on a separate line – Voyager users do NOT like this. Need to do original
cataloging, so MARC editor must work well without sending us back into the ice age. Usability
testing for staff – screen layout – especially PO screen. Most complicated set of screens in all of
Alma. Counted clicks and scrolls – even longer/more than it takes now. Reduced clicks, scrolling,
reordered. Way too much scrolling, a lot of wasted space, couldn’t see related info on the screen at
the same time. Needed collapsible sections and links out to more info. More circulation policy
matrixes – more is not better. Alma groups and simplifies. This is development, not beta testing. Ex
Libris listens and responds. Calendar – up to down instead of left to right – drove them nuts.
Managing print and electronic in the same place, using same terms – really needed.
Notes courtesy of Karin Wikoff, Ithaca College