February 15, 2006, 10:00 AM

In attendance: Richard Crane [RC] (chair), Alice Faber [AF], Donald Hailey [DH], Yvonne Manning-Jones [YMJ], Gerald McRoberts [GMR], Philip Rubin [PR], Susan Galli [SG], Joe Cardone [JC], Mike Dangelo [MD], and Samuel Nuakoh [SN].

• Laboratory / Sound studios

  Moriaty was authorized to proceed with the construction of the patch panels. Doug Honorof, Gordon Ramsey and Christine Shadle are preparing a sound status report for our acoustic consultant.
  
  
• Building issues
  
  Joe Cardone and Don Hailey presented a maintenance schedule for painting and carpet cleaning: they divided space into two categories, the higher use areas will go on a 12-18 month rotation, while the lesser traffic areas will be evaluated periodically with a 2+ year cycle. Furniture is covered under a lifetime warranty and needed repairs will be reported (by Susan Galli) as needed. Building infrastructure, including maintenance and cleaning contracts are being overseen by Don Hailey. Some specific failings in the daily cleanings were mentioned, and will be reported to the contractor. Joe Cardone will oversee supplies – he is evaluating a contract with our bottled water supplier to also supply coffee.
  
  Don Hailey will address the installation/alteration of window shade pulls.

• Servers and Software

  There was a discussion regarding developing a repository of locally developed software, in particular Matlab routines for signal processing, to help constrain the repeated reinvention of similar tools. Alice Faber raised the point that complete documentation of work created by an individual is often lacking, and is harder for anyone else to develop. We agreed that central staff should take the lead in facilitating sharing, but that individual developers would have to be primarily responsible for support in most cases. Phil Rubin will be the contact for any code contributions.
  
  Mike D’Angelo has been working on getting DVD burning for the fMRI group running on their Linux systems – the main obstacle is slightly out-of-sync version of the various software components.
  
  New Fileserver status: the new fileserver is undergoing “burn-in” – running a test utility that is exercising the entire 2.5 terabytes of formatted disk. This should be complete by the end of the week, at which point the disks will be reformatted to their final partitioning.

• Databases

  An ad-hoc Website Editorial Committee met last week for a presentation by Phil Rubin on the status of the newly redesigned website. There is an extensive list of planned and possible features not yet implemented, and a variety of design and technological enhancements contemplated. The current major efforts are in finding and fixing broken links, expanding the intranet portion, and improving searching and printing.
  
  Data Archiving: Richard Crane presented a suggestion to call for a group to look at issues dealing with storage and archiving of data generated by HL research, to include backups of very large data sets, long term retention and retrieval, data sharing, etc. Einar Mencl and Gerry McRoberts agreed to comment on a draft proposal that RC will generate.

• Other Business

  Susan Galli brought to the group’s attention the recent announcement by Grants.gov of Windows-only client software for submissions. While she will be using the system routinely, all PIs will also need to use the software during submissions. It was the consensus of the group that the platform requirement is likely to change, and that we can provide work-arounds as needed in the interim.
  
  Date for next meeting was set as March 15.