TUG Stats & Reports Fall Meeting

October 14th, 2009. 1:30-4:00 p.m.

Library Board Room, Wilfrid Laurier University Library

 

1)      Introduction of Eun-ha Hong

Eun-ha Hong was introduced to the group. For a 6 month pilot, Eun-ha will take on the role of assessment librarian at Laurier. Her major role will be to develop an assessment culture in the Library. As an immediate goal she will be accessing the Getit survey and in 2010 the LibQual survey. She is currently working with department heads to assess their reporting needs.

 

2)      Approval of Minutes from last meeting.

 

The minutes of May 27th, 2009 were approved with corrections.

 

3)      Approval of Agenda

 

The agenda was approved as amended. Vera added, “Impromptu reports review.”

 

4)      Production server replacement

a)      Presentation of the quotes-Gail/Bill

i)                    Discussion regarding replacement quotes for production server –all

Gail commented that we will get more for our money as time goes on. The memory and disk space is sufficient. The replacement server would have sufficient amount of RAM if we moved to a Cognos 8 environment and would even serve our purposes for the period that we would be still be running Cognos 7 and moving to Cognos 8 testing.  The production server replacement would serve us well for the next 3 years.

ii)                  Next steps- all

(1)   Bill and Gail will find out the hardware specifications for Cognos 8 before a proposal to TUG Exec is submitted for a production server replacement.

(2)   Get a timeline of the issues and the projected lifespan of the current production (Gail)

(3)   Put it into the budget for 2010-2011 ($7K)

(4)   Proposal to TUG Exec

(5)   Start lobbying with TUG Exec.

 

5)      Training report (ideas / discussion – all)

Bill and Gail attended a 3 day IBM Cognos 8 BI report Studio Author Professional Reports Fundamentals (v8.4) course held on the UG Campus Oct. 5-7. The training course provided good resources for the future as well as reinforced the knowledge that Gail and Bill already have acquired from other training. The course taught them new strategies and was worthwhile attending. A summary of the highlights follows:

·         Good resources were identified and contacts made with other Cognos 8 users.

·         Cognos uses XML based reports so may be some applicability to other BI tools (cross applications) if Cognos 8 ends up not to be available at all TUG sites.

·         Powerplay is very powerful and no one is aware of anything better.

·         Bill &Gail will be going to IBM Cognos Performance Day2009. 

·         Gail attended a webinar on Cognos 8 Express

 

6)      Review roles and duties for TUG S&R (Ron for discussion)

a.       Chair-Ron will continue as Chair.

b.      Recording secretary-Vera will continue as secretary and will ensure that all official minutes are forwarded to the appropriate member for posting to tug website.

c.       Web site posting (new role)-Richard has agreed to post the official minutes to the tug website.

7)      Updates

a.       UG. Datamart update-Ron

The results of departmental reporting needs were based on an older organizational structure. The new model proposes a brand new way of doing business thus further examination of data needs for Library will need to take place.

b.      Reference desk data collection –migration of MSAccess database to PHP/postgres web application for UW – Gail.

A co-op student from UW is working on the migration. Gail will find out how far along he is and will report back to this group. It has been noted that this work done at UW would benefit other TUG libraries.

c.       C8 status (update - Gail) – nothing to report; C8 status (update – Vera) Cognos 8 at Laurier has been shelved at the moment however it has been identified in the last ICT Review.  

 

8)      Training Team news

At UW, an introduction session was held on upfront basics and newsbox usage. The next session will be given in early November on running reports. No plans for formal powerplay training sessions, but have been some one on one sessions.

At WLU, basic training has been given to two new staff members.

 

 

Action Items:

1.      Gail/Bill to work on timelines for projected server

2.      Ron to approach Helen S and Kent Hoeg? Re TUG using UG license to enable future planning of libraries moving to Cognos 8.

3.      All-Lobby TUG Exec (new server and Cognos 8)

4.      Ron to forward ARL, CARL templates to group.

5.      Gail to talk to co-op student re php version of reference stats.

 

Next Meeting

Tentative date: January 27th at UG