Voyager Upgrade Update

June 11, 2009

This note provides a summary of several things related to the I-Share Voyager upgrade beginning Sunday June 14, 2009. This is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to the upgrade, just a brief update. For more detail, please refer to the I-Share upgrade page on the CARLI website at: http://www.carli.illinois.edu/mem-prod/I-Share/upgrade.html You will find a wealth of resources there including copies of the most important announcements we have sent in email about the upgrade, handouts from our webinars, lists of upgrade-related tasks for library staff to perform, Voyager documentation, and more.

TIMING
We’ve been asking you to be prepared for the upgrade to take as long as three calendar days. Our current, best estimate is that the upgrade will be done by late night Monday/early Tuesday morning, June 16, so that public and staff functions can be operational on Voyager version 7.1 for start of business on Tuesday.

The Tuesday morning availability estimate is, we must stress, only an estimate and we are still asking you to be prepared for the upgrade to run through Tuesday, if there are problems or delays. We will be updating you via these email lists on Monday and Tuesday as to the current status.

LOADING VOYAGER STAFF CLIENTS
If you will be loading the Voyager staff clients manually and not using CARLI’s client update checker, please wait until CARLI staff announce that it is OK to begin this process. We do not want you to begin this process before we are sure that the Voyager upgrade is successful. Again, watch these email lists for that “OK” message.

WHAT IS A “FROZEN” CATALOG
We have told you that there will be a “frozen,” June 7, version of the public catalog available during the upgrade. Several of you have asked for clarification on what we mean by “frozen,” so here’s an attempt to clarify that rather ambiguous phrase. We are going to use a backup copy of Voyager I-Share as the online catalog during the upgrade. This backup was made on June 7 at about 3am. Some people have asked what this means in terms of any work that is done between June 7 and June 14. The answer is that any transactions staff or patrons do, or any data that is loaded or modified in Voyager between June 7 and 14 is retained, you will not lose that work. During the upgrade you will simply be looking at a “snapshot” of the June 7 data while we work on upgrading the current databases. Once the upgrade is done, all data will again be current up to the moment.

WHAT TO EXPECT AFTER THE UPGRADE
If you were not able to participate in any of our webinars about the changes coming in Voyager 7, the PowerPoint slides that we used for those sessions are available for you on the upgrade page at http://www.carli.illinois.edu/mem-prod/I-Share/upgrade.html We also continue to have the “alternate” Voyager training databases running on version 7.1. (“Alternate” refers to the fact that we also still have version 6.5.3 training databases available for you.) Remember that these databases are generic records from Ex Libris and not your own catalog data, but please feel free to “poke around” and get a feel for version 7 if you have not already done so. For more information about the training databases, please go to this url: http://www.carli.illinois.edu/mem-prod/I-Share/secure/accessalttraindb.html

This upgrade includes major changes to the public catalog interface, WebVoyáge. It has a more modern appearance, and even better, it is now substantially more usable for visually impaired people using screen reading technology. The improvements come at a price, which is that it is more computer resource intensive. CARLI staff have done some performance testing and adjustment during the test period, but we will need to continue to make adjustments as we see how it performs under the real volume of users. We also will be doing some ongoing customization of WebVoyáge. Watch for more details on this in the coming weeks. In short, while we think you will like many things about the new WebVoyáge, please brace yourself for some bumps in the road, performance issues, and an ongoing rollout of some features over the course of the summer. As always, we greatly appreciate hearing your observations and we thank you in advance for your patience while we work to respond to system problems.

CONTACTING CARLI FOR SUPPORT
As always, the most efficient way to report problems to CARLI is by sending email to our online support system at support@carli.illinois.edu. We may have a high volume of questions right after the upgrade, so we would encourage you to check the CARLI Systems Status page anytime you are experiencing system performance issues with CARLI systems (http://blog.carli.illinois.edu/sys-status/) and to continue to refer to the material on the upgrade web page at http://www.carli.illinois.edu/mem-prod/I-Share/upgrade.html. If those sources don’t address your questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.