FOLIO Project Update – Week of May 13, 2019

The FOLIO Product Council discussed the need to estimate any additional resources needed in order to allow libraries to fully implement in summer/fall 2020. Dracine Hodges volunteered to lead that effort. PC also discussed the results of the Epic priority review. They will compare those results later with the Gap Analysis & Capacity Planning results.

Marc Johnson made a presentation to the FOLIO Technical Council on issues around scaling development in the core backend modules (mod-circulation, mod-inventory) where right now three teams are working on the same code base. His analysis leads to a few recommendations – firstly around the need to define standards for Code Reviews – which the TC will add to its backlog. Longer term they may be looking at refactoring the mod-circulation to make it more maintainable. They took a brief look at a draft list of Tech Debt presented by Jakub Skoczen and will discuss in more detail next week.

Ann-Marie gave the FOLIO Implementation Group a detailed overview of the visit to Chalmers, the demos of FOLIO and the reactions. She listed the primary features they will be using and some of the feedback for which they’ll be creating Jira issues. We heard about the Five Colleges all-staff meeting, learned of a new Italian library that is implementing FOLIO and discussed how to suggest they get involved with the SIGs and the FOLIO Implementation Group. They also discussed items for future agendas.

The Consortia SIG continued our discussion of UXPROD-795 (i.e. handling of walk-in patrons from other libraries in the consortium) and related features.

Sharon Beltaine and Eric Pennington from the Reporting SIG joined the Metadata Management SIG meeting this week to talk about in-app and data warehouse reports. They generated a number of questions and will need to continue this discussion. It is likely a subgroup will be formed to work on in-app reporting needs and/or data transformation needs.

The Reporting SIG has formed a Data Privacy subgroup to research and document a set recommendations on data privacy for reporting through the LDP data warehouse. The SIG continues to prioritize the development of report prototypes for the Report Prototype Workgroup, with a current focus on RA, MM, and annual statistics reports.

The Resource Access SIG had discussions and made decisions about title-level requesting and re-ordering request queues, continued discussion/decisions on tokens for notices. They completed discussion/decisions on tokens for notices, in-house use UI, renewal functionality related to scheduled loan periods, review of wireframes for location-related menus in the circ rules editor.

The Sys Ops & Mgt SIG and Data Migration will host 4 sessions at the D.C. meeting. At the meeting, there was discussion about implications for system administrators to install and maintain the FOLIO Reporting Data Warehouse (DW). Many questions remain open. There is a need to maintain a separate database and monitor daily and nightly processes. How much load will these create? They want to invite Nassib Nassar, the PO of the Reporting SIG, to learn more about the Reporting DW. There was a continuation of the discussion of the SysOps Backlog. Most important is the database schema upgrade topic, need to be able to upgrade databases without downtime and keep the data. Anton will collect existing Jira issues. They will address that topic again at the next meeting. Jo Drexl proposed a workflow for upgrading and for dependency resolution.