FOLIO Project Update – Week of May 4, 2020

The FOLIO Implementation Group met with Holly Mistlebauer to begin work on identifying critical features needed for Round IV libraries — those that need MVP plus additional features. The group will work on this most of the month.

The Resource Management SIG got together with members of the Reporting SIG to review the Inventory title and subscription reports. The SIG began a discussion of what aspects of receiving should appear in Inventory, and will return to this next week. The ERM Subgroup discussed relationships between Agreements and how they should be represented. The Acq Small Group discussed the tracking of financial transactions and managing payments for materials across multiple funds. Susan Martin, Middle Tennessee State University, convener of the Acquisitions Small Group, stepped down (hopefully temporarily) to avoid a conflict of interest with her institution’s RFP process. Heather Thoele, Texas A&M, will convene the Acq Small Group.

The Metadata Management SIG had a focused session on bound-withs. The SIG had demos and discussions of how these materials are represented in various systems and at different institutions. The goal is to find a solution that is less onerous for staff, clearer to users, and works for reporting needs. The working group on analytics and bound-withs will be revived to come to agreement on desired behavior in Inventory, particularly around item records for bound-withs.

The Reporting SIG  is preparing to offer a FOLIO Forum presentation this summer to demonstrate reporting queries that are being developed for use with the Library Data Platform. To help make the LDP GDPR compliant, the LDP Data Privacy subgroup will identify tables that have foreign keys referencing tables containing personal data. The RM Reports subgroup is gathering feedback from the RM and MM SIGs on report prototypes for title, item, and subscription counts. The MM Reports subgroup is working on a report prototype for External Holdings. The ERM Reports subgroup has provided data documentation on ERM data attributes that may now be viewed with the Reporting Data Dictionary (FOLIO Schema Parser).The LDPdevelopment  team have released LDP version 0.7.2.

The Resource Access SIG conducted discussions of RA-related MVp slippage, formats for refund processing, loan record export permissions, and available circulation actions on closed orders.

The Sys Ops & Mgt SIG saw reports of problems of database schema updates in Q1 Fameflower Hotfix. Topics for future meetings include:

  • Migrating historical circulation data. This is an important fix, and stories need to be written for it.
  • mod-saml and mod-saml-login. Federation support is needed; Tod will write up requirements. This will need a PO and several JIRA tickets. These modules need to be actively maintained. There were discussions of using 3rd party tools like Apache and nginx as providers for SAML authentication and attribute release so as to eliminate the need to maintain Folio SAML code.
  • Identifying use cases for SAML authentication.

The next FOLIO Forum from the Forum Facilitators SIG is on May 20 at 11am Eastern U.S. time. It will feature the Inventory app and the QuickMARC app.  https://discuss.folio.org/t/2852