 Jim has completed management of the expansion of a functioning Local Area Network with 15 workstations and numerous peripherals at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania. The purpose of the network is to provide basic office and business operating functions for the Friends of the Museum, and to house a major library and archives record system that has been under development for several years. The latter will assist staff and researchers in finding and managing tens of thousands of records of historic railroad documents, negatives, photographs and other archival ephemera.
Known as LADRS (Library and Archives Data Retrieval System), this major application has been developed by a skilled volunteer programmer working with a Library committee and the Computer Committee. Completion of this project will be a key accomplishment in support of the Museum's forthcoming accreditation review by the American Association of Museums. It features:
- Conversion of legacy records from early Apple systems
- Cataloging of thousands of books, serials, and archival holdings, making use of Inmagic™, Bookwhere™, and Microsoft Access™ systems. Library of Congress, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and other professional standards are observed.
- Transfer of populated databases to increasingly sophisticated, user-friendly search mechanisms to be accessible via the Internet in 2006. To enable this, Jim prepared a successful foundation grant application. A second application to the Norfolk Southern Foudation provided additional funding for new equipment.
The overall LAN project has involved Jim's management skills in:
- Leading a team of volunteers and staff in outlining the broad objectives to be achieved.
- Development of successive plans for equipment and LAN implementation.
- Managing project financing over several years' budgets.
- Coordination with contractors, vendors, volunteers, and site managers.
- Procurement services for hardware, software and support.
- Extensive hands-on activity in managing, installing, troubleshooting, and promoting the effective use of the system by staff and volunteers, including training and system configuration.
- Replacement of previous dialup service with a networked DSL connection to Verizon, with Firewall and virus protection features. Incoming Email is routed through the server that handles the Museum's award-winning web site that Jim also manages.
- Connection of the LAN to the Museum Store's Point Of Sale system for backup and remote communication purposes.
The LAN currently features:
- Two Dell 2850 rack mounted servers, running Windows Server 2003.
- Fifteen connected workstations, plus laptops and other peripherals.
- Watchguard Technologies X50 firewall.
- Battery backups on servers and workstations.
- Microsoft Office and other specialized applications for financial , membership, and library systems.
- A growing array of Network Attached Storage (NAS) units.
- Three network laser printers.
- Several network switches with Gigabyte capability.
- Most recently, a fiber backbone was added.
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