FOLIO Project Update – Week of July 29, 2019

The FOLIO Product Council met on August 1 and discussed:

  • Anton Amelianov’s presentation about manual testing as part of the Bug Fests and his call to build a pool of community members to take over performing these tests. PC members agreed to seek out participants from their institutions to take part. Estimated time commitment for testers is approximately 8 hours per FOLIO release (every 6 weeks). This time will be required during a specific 2-3 day window each release.
  • Updates from the Capacity Planning group and from PC members who attended the recent Stakeholder meeting
  • A call for institutions to rank several Reporting-related features so the Reporting SIG could identify highest priority work going forward.

The ERM subgroup of the Resource Management SIG met and discussed the need and process for deleting agreement records, and what safeguards should be in place to prevent accidental deletion of important information. The Acquisition Small Group discussed accounting codes, budget details, and order and check-in for packages. The main RM SIG returned to the renewal process for continuations and decided to spend the next three weeks with a focused discussion around continuation orders and the renewal process.

The Metadata Management SIG continued a discussion of use cases for batch editing, including possible workarounds if needed. Workarounds for batch editing are highly dependent on robust export and import functionality. A new subgroup is forming to assist Magda Zacharska who is now PO for Data Export.

The Reporting SIG discussed options for maintaining GDPR compliance in light of the 26 reports that the Reporting Data Privacy Subgroup has identified that use personal information. Work will continue to determine solutions. The SIG also reviewed 4 key JIRA issues highlighting FOLIO development features that are dependencies for the Library Data Platform (LDP) to Go Live, such as the creation of a process for tracking data-related API schema changes.

The Sys Ops & Mgt SIG discussed NCIP integration for the patron lookup functionality. Work needs to be done for Lehigh, who uses NCIP. The SIG identified RFID integration as a gap, which is needed by Chalmers and by the GBV libraries. RFID is used for self checkout/check-in and for activating/deactivating the security chip on a book. Harry will manage it and also talk to Uschi (GBV).

Harry also walked the SIG through the 4 blocker issues defined by the Reporting SIG. One issue has been handled, and the others are works in progress. The complete documentation of module APIs is considered extremely important as it will be needed for reporting.

The SIG also explicated migration plans and timelines for Chalmers, the German university libraries and the American implementers. An automatic synchronization between an old and new (FOLIO) systems running in parallel has not been reported as a need by any of the implementers, although some plan to run both systems in parallel for a short period of time.

The Forum Facilitators SIG is changing the cadence of webinars starting in the fall, moving from bi-weekly to monthly Forums. The SIG is also going to focus more on FOLIO-related topics and defer more general topics to the Open Library Foundation’s outreach committee.