FOLIO Project Update – Month of January 2021

In the Metadata Management SIG, there have been concerns about MARCCat development. Technical Council reviewed what’s been done and asked for the SIG to review the findings. MARCCat work is halted, instead they want to expand QuickMARC. Khalilah will be the Product Owner. The outcome of the SIG discussions on MARC creation/editing requirements, cataloging tool recommendations is here: Synthesis of MARC requirements. There will now be longer meetings starting in 2021 (starting 30 minutes earlier) in order to make room for more hands-on activities such as implementer demos. A working group has generated a draft vision for productivity stats in Inventory. They are seeking feedback now, especially from SMEs outside of the SIG (draft JIRA). They are also talking about documentation and coordinating work across individual institutions and FOLIO community.

The App Interaction SIG invited Maura and discussed on requirements when a user record is deleted. There is the need to clear all dependencies or at least for some kind of notification on the deletion so that actions can be taken as a consequence on any linked records (meeting minutes). They reviewed some proposed UX patterns for keyboard shortcut lists and the updated patterns to export results lists (meeting minutes). In relation to cross-app searching, the SIG discussed mock-ups to search and update tags across all apps (tags will be phase 2).  One possibility is to use tags as POC for cross-app search, it will depend on what is ranked higher. In relation to cross-app searching, Magda presented on plans for and status of Elastic search development. It seems that the so far ES planning and development cannot be reused for cross-app searching, but it could be extended to search within other apps on different record types at the same time. There will be a planning meeting upcoming Friday to decide on topics to focus on.

In the Resource Management SIG, there was a discussion around e-resource usage and integration with FOLIO functionality. Annika Schröer introduced In-app usage reporting capabilities for eUsage and Agreements. Kristen Wilson from Index Data is the Product Owner, the new group met for the first time January. Khalilah Gambrell demonstrated how EBSCO Usage Consolidation (for EBSCO EKB customers) will be integrated via the eHoldings App. There was a walk-through of work done to date with EDI invoices. Final work on it is expected to be completed for Iris. The ERM subgroup discussed the different roles for Organizations as they are associated with Agreements (e.g., Vendor, Content Provider, Platform Provider) and handling dates within Agreement periods. The Acquisitions Small Group discussed adjusting orders after they have been opened, custom fields for more flexibility for recording information in Orders, fiscal year rollover, and workflows where orders could be placed from Inventory.

The User Management SIG has been defining the requirements for informational notes that should pop up when a user’s barcode is scanned (UXPROD-2814). They’ve been providing feedback on the development of a new function, changing a user’s expiration date. Maura reported on an App Interaction meeting where we discussed removing dependencies when we delete a user. They’ve been made aware of a couple of problems with the user loader in Honeysuckle.

The Resource Access SIG is documenting how Resource Access Staff works in FOLIO, working on Bugfest review and questions, and are reviewing and approving the draft mock-up of the transfer criteria page.

The Reporting SIG notes that all FOLIO participating institutions should review Reporting SIG-All Report Clusters (52 issues) in JIRA and rank each report cluster for your institution (R1-R5). For reporting, institutions only need to rank the UXPROD Report Cluster JIRA issues. All reporting requirements, which are captured in REP-XXX issues, roll up to the UXPROD Report Clusters. Report clusters cover one or more report (REP-XXX issue) requirements. In terms of how FOLIO participating institutions help with FOLIO Reporting, they can: contribute an SQL Developer to work with subject matter experts in the Reporting SIG to understand report requirements, then to develop new, open source report queries for the FOLIO community; and they can contribute a Test Data Developer to work with the Reporting SIG to assist the reporting community with curating and generating test data for our development environment so that report writers can test their queries with substantial data sets. Regarding Derived Tables, the SIG working groups for all functional areas are collaborating on derived table query development for FOLIO Reporting. At this time, 47 derived table queries identified so far have been written, tested, indexed, and posted on the FOLIO Analytics GitHub at https://github.com/folio-org/folio-analytics/tree/master/sql/derived_tables. There are five reporting subgroups working on report development for the FOLIO Analytics report repository: Resource Management, Metadata Management, Electronic Resource Management, Resource Access/User Management, and External Statistics. Report development leads are now meeting weekly with the Reporting Product Owner to review query development progress and issues. Currently, the RM Reports Working Group is working on queries for title, item, and subscription count reports as well as invoice, purchase order, and fund reports. The MM Reports Working Group is working on queries for duplicate orders, pick list, title and volume count reports. The ERM Reports Working Group is working on report model development for using data from eHoldings and agreements. The RA/UM Working Group is working with Cate on a solution for showing data on recalls in reports and refactoring existing queries to use derived tables. The four main functional area subgroups will take on queries for External Statistics reports such as ACRL, ARL, etc. These reports will require running multiple queries to run, but will each be captured under one UXPROD issue. When a data element needed for one or more reports is missing, the SIG reporting development groups have been working closely with FOLIO app functional area Product Owners to address the impact of missing data elements on report development. LDP (Library Data Platform) LDP 1.1.8 is available. A bug has been fixed that caused incorrect encoding of control characters in JSON data (https://github.com/library-data-platform/ldp/releases/tag/1.1.8 or use the 1.1-release branch).

The Consortia SIG have filled out a vision document for an open source bib utility. They are meeting with the ReShare Steering Committee on the 25th to talk about how this project might fit within Project ReShare. Work continues on the INN-Reach integration subgroup. Noah Brubaker from PALCI will be taking over as SIG convener this year.

In the Accessibility SIG, testing with CU Boulder continues (they’ve identified some discrepancies between NVDA and JAWS). Testing is beginning to be explored with new members of the SIG from Michigan State University. Keyboard enhancement stories are added to JIRA (filter link). They are redesigning the wiki space to make sure the needed information for potential adoptees is available.

The SysOps SIG did not have many meetings because of holidays. They had Marcia in the SIG. SysOps documentation looks great so far! They will collect information for data migration docs in the DM subgroup. The SIG requests to prioritize bulk API development (Bulk API support request).

At its last December meeting the Implementers SIG discussed the proposed Iris release date to May 3, which was then brought to PC.  At the first January meeting Jakub Skoczen talked about Optimistic Locking, the pros and cons of using this method, the lack of development so far due to low rankings, and the need for development in 2021.  Earlier this week Craig McNally of the Tech Council led a discussion on problems with permissions for new releases, getting feedback from the implemented libraries to take back to TC. There is confusion over definitions, where to find descriptions, how to identify new permissions vs. changed vs. deprecated, etc.

The Community Outreach SIG did not meet last month. At their upcoming meeting, they will discuss outreach priorities for the upcoming year. Please remember to update Rachel (or the group) when you are presenting on FOLIO so they can update the public calendar.

The Product Council has heard updates from Reporting regarding their survey of member needs and an update on the status of MARCCat.  There was significant discussion about the Cap Plan proposal to delay Iris until May and Juniper until late in the year, giving only two releases in 2021.  The PC preferred Iris to be released in April with a smaller Juniper release mid-year and Kiwi before the end of 2021. Last week the PC discussed the final Governance proposal, received an update on documentation, and heard a request from the Data Migration Subgroup for developer resources for development of a Bulk API.

Update on release planning and technical debt from the cap planning team: Follow-Up: Request to Extend Iris Release Date