The next meeting of the Oxford University Colleges IT Group
will be held on Tuesday 1st May 2007 at 14.15 hours at the Evenlode Lecture
Room, OUCS,
A G E N D A
1. Apologies for absence
2. Minutes of the meeting held on 1st February 2007
3. Matters Arising
3.1 Minute 397 Proposed Web Managers Conference
7. Report from other committees and groups
7.1 IT Support Staff Group – http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/oxford/groups/itssg/meetings/2007-02-14/minutes.html
8. Joint meeting in Michaelmas with Committee of College Librarians (and any relevant archivists)
9. Software Licensing Group – representation and feedback
10. University-wide Web Review - http://www.ict.ox.ac.uk/oxford/groups/colleges/papers/webreview.htm
11. Items raised by representatives
12. Any Other Business
13. Date of Next Meeting:
Items
(1)-(3) are important for report whilst the remaining items arise from the last
meeting of the Information and Communications Technology Committee (ICTC) on
the 1st March 2007.
1) The Colleges'
IT Group has been formally ratified as being under the umbrella of Conference
of Colleges. It has now been decided by Conference that the CITG will report
directly to Conference's Estates Bursars' Committee each term (rather than to
the Finance and General Purposes Sub-Committee as reported previously).
2) It has been
clarified with the Conference of Colleges that Permanent Private Halls (PPHs) are part of the remit of the CITG. Hence the contact
details for all the PPH IT officers have been collected and included in the
CITG mailing list for information on CITG meetings and for the dissemination of
IT information. The CITG constitution has also been revised to include the PPHs.
3) As agreed at
the last CITG meeting, the details of all college web managers (on the
technical side) have been collated and these have now been included in the
web-managers mailing lists.
4) The
ECE and ICT Support Team were reported on as follows. Service level definitions
had been drafted and would hopefully be agreed at the next meeting of the ECE
Project Board. A purchasing policy for hardware was in place and a policy for software
would follow. Implementation of the notification server was being worked on.
The Altiris Helpdesk was now live within OUCS and
would be rolled out in due course to OULS and Central Admin. The team was still
involved to a significant degree with inherited commitments, including the move
of OULS to Exchange and the replacement of 900 PCs in Central Admin. For the
future, an Apple Support Desktop Service was in preparation and a pilot service
was in operation in OUCS; in due course, it was hoped that this could be rolled
out to the wider University.
5) It
was reported that electronic
circulation of examination papers during the preparation stage was not allowed
under current regulations, although anecdotal evidence suggested that in
practice it was already commonplace in some parts of the University. Following
discussions with the Proctors, two software packages had been tested, both of
which had been found to be secure but one was unacceptably complex to operate.
OUCS are now attempting to introduce further simplifications to the other
systems by assessing off-the-shelf solutions.
6) It was reported that although the
University had now subscribed to the national plagiarism-detection software,
the MPLS Division had decided not to use it due to the University’s stipulation
that students should be asked, but not required, to sign a declaration
permitting the use of the software on their (electronic) scripts. It was
agreed to draw this to the attention of the EPSC Secretariat in the hope that
the University would develop a clear policy on an issue that was known to be
under consideration at a number of universities; a possible solution might be
to include a reference in the student contract indicating the use of
plagiarism-detection software on all submitted scripts.
Annual Report
OUCS Annual Report 2005/06 and Five Year Plan are now available
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/internal/annrep/annrep0506/
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/internal/5yr/2007-2011.xml
Secure Logon to Herald
Warning messages have been sent out to individual users. ITSS can check insecure
accesses for their unit at the site:
https://sysdev.oucs.ox.ac.uk/loganalysis/plaintext-logins/by-unit/
The remaining timetable for messages is:
. 1 May 2007 - Another warning message.
. 4 June 2007 - Final monthly message.
. 18 June 2007 - More dire yet!
. 21 June - not a message but big push at ITSS Conference to
remind ITSS.
. 25 June 2007 - Final week warning message.
. 26-29 June 2007 - Daily message to those who have offended
in the last 24 hours.
. 1 July 2007 - Final message
. 2 July 2007 - Switch off during at-risk period!
British National Corpus
New XML Edition of the British National Corpus has been released. The British
National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection of samples of written
and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide
cross-section of British English from the later part of the 20th century, both
spoken and written. The latest edition, the BNC XML Edition, is a revised and
enhanced version of BNC World, with many corrections, and enriched annotation.
It is distributed in XML format together with pre-built indexes for use with
XAIRA, an open source XML search engine. Licensing information and technical
requirements are available from the BNC website.
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/news.xml
Weblearn Upgrade
WebLearn was upgraded on the morning of 17 April and
is now up and running with some new features, including: more advanced content
editor for text area boxes (using FCKEditor) - this
looks much more like a standard word processor; new easy document authoring
too, called 'EasyWriter'; simplified resource
creation - no insistence on descriptions and introductions for resources;
display of keywords for resources
http://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/site/info/announce/2_16/details/
OUCS Reps
OUCS reps have had successful meetings this term with Kellogg College,
Philosophy Faculty, Christ Church, OUCE, MPLS, Wolfson
College and Humanities Division.
Tools for Teaching
OUCS ran a very successful Tools for Teaching event on
23 April. A "Breakfast at OUCS" for new staff is scheduled for 18
May. All new staff will be individually invited. A Graduate Day is being held
on 19 June. OxTalent are holding their Show and
50th Anniversary of
Computing at Oxford
Computing at
Printing Services
OUCS will be promoting its printing services this term since the acquisition of
a new two-colour press. All kinds of printing from leaflets and invitations to
books can be undertaken.
W3C's New Standard
OUCS staff have made significant contributions to the
W3C's new standard for internationalised web content, the Internationalized Tag
Set.
http://www.w3.org/News/2007#item64
Funding to Improve
Services
OUCS was successful in attracting some in-year funding from PRAC to bolster key
services. First, we can continue with the planned expansion of the Herald
quota. We aim to get this to 1GB before the start of the next academic year.
Second, funding for the development of WebLearn is
now secured up to 2010. This will allow us to continue to add features but also
to work closely with Universities (such as
Service Level
Definitions
OUCS is in the process of making a complete set of service level definitions
available describing all our services in detail. We very much view these as
living documents and hope to sit down with divisional reps and see if they think
these are the right services, if they could be modified at all, and so on.
Podcasting through OxITEMS
OxITEMS - the RSS service offered by OUCS has
developed even further. It can now handle podcasts.
Plagiarism Software
OUCS is continuing discussions with the proctors on plagiarism
software and encryption tools. With the former we think there will be an
announcement soon about
OUCS Online Shop
The next version of the online shop, which will include searching
and persistent shopping basket has been promised to OUCS for early May. We
shall see. It is already two months overdue. It will take some weeks from its
release to being in use for the OUCS shop as,
unfortunately, conversion to the new system is not automated.
Mark-It
OUCS is investigating if there is much use of Mark-It within
Social Sciences. If you are using it could you contact Mike Fraser.
TSM Backup Clients
There is a new TSM Backup client for Intel and PPC Mac
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/hfs/news
Last ever Sophos Version 4 client released
Version 4.15 (March 2007) is the last ever version of Sophos anti-virus. The CD will no longer be available in
the OUCS shop from the end of March 2007 and all users should upgrade to
version 6.x clients if possible. Those unable to upgrade (Win9x, MacOS8/9 etc)
are recommended to use AVG which is free for PERSONAL use only
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/viruses/
OSSWatch
OSSWatch is growing and blogging as a team
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/about/staff.xml
http://involve.jisc.ac.uk/wpmu/oss-watch
OLIS
- Preparation for New Library Management System
The new library management system (LMS) is scheduled to go live on Monday 3 September, 2007. Configuration and testing of the Virtua software is being carried out by members of the LMS Project Implementation team and library staff. Training for library staff will be held from Monday 18 June to Friday 24 August. Plans for ICT support for library staff and the roll-over from Geac Advance to the new Virtua LMS are being discussed in relation to the forthcoming ICT Support Team/OULS Service Level Definition. Many libraries have now successfully downloaded the test client software from the LMS website so we do not anticipate issues in this area. Members of the OLIS team are coordinating the distribution of notices, self-issue systems and circulation back-up and they will be providing more information in due course.
For more information see the LMS website http://www.ouls.ox.ac.uk/lms or email lms@ouls.ox.ac.uk
Oxford Research Archive (http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk) is now
live and accepting ePrints. The technical development
has included work on content models and the implementation of WebAuth for authentication. There is also a means of
gathering usage statistics. The ORA team is very pleased that progress with
digital copies of