I-Share (CARLI's Voyager) Upgrade to begin on June 15, 2006
I am writing to update you on CARLI's plans to upgrade the I-Share system. We have just received the edition of Voyager version 6.1 that Endeavor intends to release in production, and so we now can confirm the previously announced plan to begin our upgrade on June 15. A timeline of upgrade-related events that impact your library is available at http://carli.illinois.edu/I-Share/docs/06voyuptimeln.pdf. Please be sure to share this information with your colleagues and information about the service implications of the upgrade with library users. Status updates or changes to this plan, if necessary, will be announced to this listserv and posted on the CARLI website.
Project summary for those who don’t need all of the details
A major upgrade to the I-Share system will begin on Thursday, June 15, 2006. The system will be shut down at 5pm on June 14. On the morning of June 15, I-Share will be brought online in “read-only” status which means that you can perform searches, but cannot do anything that would change a record’s content or status. The upgrade is expected to take up to two weeks to complete. The system will remain in read-only status for the duration of the upgrade. Please make your library users aware that they will not be able to place requests for other libraries’ material through I-Share from June 6 through the completion of the upgrade, but that the request service will be reinstated on completion of the upgrade. (If your library allows your patrons to place call slip requests against your own collection, that service will be active until June 14, and then suspended during the upgrade.) All of your library staff PC’s that run Voyager clients for circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, serials, etc. will need to have the new Voyager version 6.1 clients installed before they can connect to I-Share when the upgrade is completed.
Background and overview for those who want more detail
We have developed a timeline that shows key dates and events that will impact your library. Please see http://carli.illinois.edu/I-Share/docs/06voyuptimeln.pdf. We also have a 6.1 upgrade webpage at http://carli.illinois.edu/I-Share/docs/06upgrade.html .
This week, CARLI received updated versions of the Endeavor Voyager 6.1 client and server programs. Endeavor has indicated that they do not expect to release any newer versions of the 6.1 clients between now and the time we plan to upgrade. Because of that, we are now as certain as we expect to ever be about the timeline for the rest of the project. We have begun preparing our automated Voyager Client Update Checker service to make the newest clients available when the upgrade is completed. For those who would like to download the clients early, in order to use them with the upgraded training databases, we will post the newest clients to our website, next week, for manual download and installation.
This upgrade will move I-Share forward three Voyager versions. We are currently operating on version 2001.2. This upgrade project will provide us with the enhancements and fixes in the Unicode version, Version 5, and Version 6.1. Field testing of Version 6.1 is just now completing, and CARLI will be among the first round of Voyager customers to use 6.1 in production. The CARLI staff have been testing 6.1 in our test environment for several weeks and have been working with Endeavor and other test sites on this effort.
All library staff PC’s that run the Voyager clients will need to be running the version 6.1 clients when the upgrade is completed. These PC’s will be upgraded directly from version 2001.2 to 6.1 (i.e., you will not install the Unicode and/or version 5 clients, as interim steps). The version 6.1 clients will NOT work with version 2001.2, so you must continue using the 2001.2 clients until the upgrade. As mentioned above, CARLI offers two methods for upgrading Voyager clients: you may download them from the CARLI website and install them yourself, or you may use CARLI’s own Voyager Client Update Checker program. You can find out more about the Client Update Checker at http://carli.illinois.edu/I-Share/secure/execute/.
The CARLI staff have tested and timed the upgrade process on our Voyager test system. Based on those trials, we are cautiously forecasting the upgrade taking up to two full weeks. When we begin the upgrade “for real” on our production system, we will be working on a larger and faster server. Because of the differences between the test and production servers, we will have our best timing information once the process has begun on the production server. On or before June 19, we plan to announce a revised estimate on the time it will take to complete the upgrade. We are aware that the American Library Association conference begins later that week and we want to give you the best timing information we have before people leave for the conference.
During the upgrade, you will be able to search your local Voyager database and the Universal Catalog. You will be searching a version of the Universal Catalog that was frozen as of June 6, and local catalogs (i.e., individual libraries’ Voyager databases) that were frozen as of June 14.
You will not be able to place requests for materials held at other I-Share libraries between June 6 and the end of the upgrade. Because it takes some time for materials requested through Voyager’s Universal Borrowing (UB) to be processed and to move between libraries, we need to turn off the ability to place UB requests several days before the upgrade. (Libraries that allow internal “call slip” requests will be allowed to do so through June 14.) This allows us to have the most comprehensive information as to the whereabouts of materials during the upgrade. That is, the interval from June 6 until the system becomes frozen on June 14 should allow most items requested by June 6 to be routed out, travel to their destination, and be routed in before the system becomes “read-only” on the evening of June 14.
Circulation staff will be able to use either the 2001.2 or 6.1 Voyager circulation clients in Offline Backup Circulation (OBC) mode during the upgrade. OBC allows charges and renewals (only—no discharges or other circulation transactions are supported). The OBC feature of the circulation client is invoked automatically when the Voyager server is unavailable, as it will be after 5pm, June 14. Once the upgrade is complete, these OBC transactions need to be uploaded. For more information on this see http://www.carli.illinois.edu/I-Share/secure/upgcall/OBC.ppt.
Please note that you will not be able to query the Voyager patron database during the upgrade. This may impact how your library wishes to verify borrower IDs for any walk-in traffic, particularly patrons from other I-Share libraries. Again, for more information, refer to http://www.carli.illinois.edu/I-Share/secure/upgcall/OBC.ppt.
There are three main reasons why this upgrade takes so much longer than a “typical” Voyager upgrade: Unicode, our size, and our interconnectivity through Universal Borrowing and the Universal Catalog. Unicode is a data encoding scheme that provides support for non-Roman character sets such as Chinese and Arabic. As part of this upgrade, every bibliographic, holding and authority record in I-Share needs to be re-written to support Unicode and then be re-indexed. CARLI staff have done extensive testing and planning to make this process go as quickly as possible including planning to run several individual library database upgrades in parallel. We have also developed a strategy that allows us to upgrade one copy of the LC authority files we store for each library, and then to copy the upgraded file to each library database. We will use that process for the majority of our libraries, which do not make many changes to their authority files. That process saves us a considerable amount of time. Because of our many interconnections between the 65 I-Share libraries, it is not possible to bring libraries back online one by one as each library’s database upgrade is completed. Every library has Universal Borrowing transactions that must stay synchronized in the item and patron databases. This synchronization cannot happen across versions of Voyager. That is, a database on version 2001.2 cannot exchange information about patron and item statuses with a database on version 6.1. Likewise, the Universal Catalog cannot retrieve item holding status information from databases on different versions. Hence, we must go offline and come back online together as a group of 65 libraries.
It’s worth noting two more things about this upgrade: First, there are no more Voyager upgrades of this magnitude in the foreseeable future. Subsequent upgrades should be to the Voyager software only (and not to the entire data structure as with the Unicode conversion). Consequently, the next few upgrades should be much faster than this one, and have far fewer implications on library service. Second, we think it is worth mentioning that we are able to provide services like the static view of the catalog during the upgrade because of the investments the consortium has made in the I-Share server environment. Because we have a redundant disaster recovery system, we are able to have an online catalog available for searching during this massive upgrade. Additionally, having a robust test environment has allowed us to participate in the product field test, work through the conversion scripts and identify a number of issues during the field test process rather than in our production environment.
Once the upgrade is completed, CARLI staff will post announcements to our listservs.
Following the upgrade, we are going to rebuild the Universal Catalog (UC) to deduplicate its bibliographic records and increase precision in catalog search results. This process entails copying and comparing every bibliographic record in all 65 databases, merging duplicates, linking holdings in the 65 local Voyager databases to the unique bibliographic records in the Universal Catalog, and, of course, reindexing. We last performed this process in 2004. We expect this procedure to take approximately 3 weeks. During the UC rebuild, we will provide access to a static view of the UC. Again, we will keep you informed of when this process will start (a few days after the upgrade) and when we expect it to be finished.
Further reading for those who want ALL the details
Please see our 6.1 upgrade project web page at: http://carli.illinois.edu/I-Share/docs/06upgrade.html and Endeavor’s Voyager 6.1 release notes (and more) on their SupportWeb site (password required) at https://support.endinfosys.com/cust/voy/doc/release_notes/release-notes.html .
Contacting CARLI
No project of this magnitude is without issues, so this is a good time to repeat that CARLI, rather than Endeavor, should be your primary contact for any questions or issues you have about the upgrade or other Voyager matters. CARLI has two new ways for you to contact us for support. We now have a toll free telephone number: 1-866-904-5843; and our new address for online support is: support@carli.illinois.edu.