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Dot-Comming McGill University's Library and Enterprise Systems

McGill University Rebuilds on an Enterprise Architecture

In 1829, McGill College offered its first courses from James McGill's home in Montreal, Canada. 175 years later, McGill University is one of North America's leading educational institutions, with approximately 7,360 employees, 28,700 English- and French-speaking students and 50 buildings spanning two campuses. To keep pace with growth and technological trends, the university is migrating its mainframe-based administrative operations to a sophisticated enterprise system driven by Sun Enterprise servers, Sun StorEdge arrays, the Sun Solaris Operating System, the Oracle Relational Database, Ex Libris' ALEPH 500 library management software (LMS) and SCT's Banner 2000 administrative solution.

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Selecting a New Library Management System

The university decided to deploy the new enterprise architecture in phases, starting with the library (comprised of 16 individual libraries), followed by finance, human resources and student services. Designed in the '80s, the library's mainframe-based system was no longer adequate. "We were looking for a solution based on Internet technology capable of providing new information services for our students," says Frances Groen, director of libraries, McGill University Library. "The teaching and learning environment is moving towards Web-based support and a significant portion of our collection is now electronic. We needed a gateway to the world and a system capable of building the digital library."

In the fall of 1998, Sharon Rankin, systems librarian, led a team to select the best library management system for McGill. "The library wanted an integrated, open and adaptable system and chose from available UNIX-based client/server solutions. After evaluating many different options, we chose ALEPH 500 from Ex Libris in December 1999."

Ex Libris' Automated Library Expandable Program (ALEPH) 500 is a comprehensive LMS solution that provides the bilingual functionality the McGill University Library needs for public services (online catalogue, circulation, course reserves) and business operations (cataloguing, book ordering, journal receipts). Rankin says, "Students can use the Web to display their library account, renew books online and receive their library correspondence and references by e-mail. The most important feature of ALEPH 500 however, is that it is Internet ready, so the system can be accessed from anywhere at anytime."

Even though Sun systems predominated on campus, McGill investigated several platforms to support the new computing enterprise. "We've been a Sun house at McGill for quite a while, but this was a big move, migrating our systems from the mainframe," said Bruce Pennycook, McGill University's vice principal for information systems and technology. "There are two reasons we ultimately chose Sun. We had in-house Solaris experience from other Sun applications on campus and both Ex Libris and SCT preferred the Oracle implementation under Solaris. Oracle and Solaris offer the best fit-there's no argument there."

Sun servers, including the Sun SPARC and Sun Ultra series, have proliferated on campus since the early 1990s. "Three quarters of the research computing at McGill, or better, is on Sun systems," notes Shelly Feran, manager UNIX/NT Network Services, McGill Computing Centre. "Our computing centre maintains over 20 Sun systems. I've worked on many different platforms but Sun wins in terms of service, pricing and market share."

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Deploying the New System

Once the university chose its IT partners, computing centre staff began sizing the new systems, which Rankin, Feran and Pennycook agreed was the most difficult part of the process. "The library has over 300 public PCs and we have another 330 staff PCs connected over a switched Ethernet LAN," said Rankin. "The system is also available across campus from any computer lab, office and home. So potentially we can have a large number of simultaneous users. We also have very large, interconnected databases which include 1.8 million bibliographic records, 1.8 millionauthority records and 2.8 million item records."

"Representatives from Ex Libris and Sun helped size the new library system," Feran notes. The university ultimately purchased one Sun Enterprise 5500 server with nine processors and 4 GB of memory to run version 5.6 of the Solaris Operating System, Oracle 7 and ALEPH 500. Two fully mirrored Sun StorEdge A5200 fibre channel arrays would house the library's databases on 24 disks, 9 GB each. "The Sun Enterprise 5500 still has room to scale," stressed Rankin. "That was an extremely important factor in our choice.

In May 2000, the university's computer centre staff installed and deployed the new Sun Enterprise 5500. Said Feran, "Sun's Enterprise Service's team configured the new server. It took us about one day to set it up." Library staff then worked with Ex Libris to convert the database files from the mainframe to the new system. The team loaded 1,800,000 bibliographic records in only five hours - 360,000 records per hour. It took only 50 additional hours to index all of the records. "The Sun server performed flawlessly," Feran added.

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Enterprise System Success and Growth

"In June 2000, we migrated our financial system on a Enterprise 3500 server running the Solaris Operating System, Banner 2000 and Oracle," said Pennycook. "The two remaining system components in human resources and student services will also run Banner and Oracle on Sun servers. The human resources' system is currently being tested on two Sun Enterprise 450 servers and is scheduled for production in January 2001. The student services' system is still being built, and will be by far the largest in our enterprise."

The new library system, dubbed MUSE II, went live on May 1, 2000. Ex Libris president Carl Grant, comments on the success of the university's deployment. "As a truly international institution, McGill can use ALEPH as the cornerstone of their digital library efforts, giving people access to worldwide information resources and providing a showcase computing solution for all university libraries to come and see."

The McGill University Library is phasing in additional Ex Libris modules over the summer. "The library's next focus is digitization," concludes Rankin. "We will be increasing our creation of digital resources for example, electronic versions of exams and course evaluations. We will continue to rely on Sun computing technologies to serve increasingly large digital databases."

By migrating its library and administrative systems to a fully integrated, enterprise solution built on reliable, scalable and robust technologies from Sun Microsystems, Ex Libris, SCT and Banner, McGill University will streamline its operations and continue providing world-class educational services.

McGill University

Dot-comming McGill University's library and enterprise systems "I've worked on many different platforms but Sun wins in terms of service, pricing and market share."

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