FOLIO Project Update – Week of October 8, 2018

During the FOLIO Product Council weekly meeting, Cate demoed new reporting and tracking features for the current and upcoming quarterly releases.  All releases will now receive flower names and Q4 is now known as Aster.  There were round robin reports from the SIG conveners.

The FOLIO Technical Council reviewed the library data platform architecture document with its author Nassib Nassar. This is planned to be the basis for the reporting capabilities for FOLIO. The end-to-end prototype will be completed in 3 weeks. TC will circle back with Nassib at that time. They assigned reviewers of the first RFC – Asynchronous Event Service. They requested the review to be complete by 26-Oct. Stripes Architectural reviewis  shifting from Taras Mankovski to Jeffrey Cherewaty.

The Accessibility SIG is available to access usability and accessibility of working code in development.  We have begun to schedule regular testing with the Accessibility Lab at CU Boulder – with the second round of testing scheduled for the end of November/first of December. At that time, we will most likely be testing one of the subsets of the Acquisition application – either Finance, Vendors or Orders.

The Consortia SIG reviewed the “union catalog” app idea that was recently submitted. There had been some previous discussion about this consortial feature within the SIG as well. Conversations with Harry Kaplanian on the OAI-PMH project and Sebastian Hammer on the ReShare project that are scheduled for upcoming weeks will align nicely with further investigation into how FOLIO can provide union catalog functionality.

Work continues within the ERM subgroup of the Resource Management SIG to consider data flows and provide UI mock-ups for ERM functionality. User Acceptance Testing on the Acquisitions Finance module occurred this week, with results anticipated to be reported out next week.

Harry Kaplanian presented for Metadata Management SIG this week on the OAI-PMH project. This dovetailed nicely with the SIG’s current discussion of deletion/mark for deletion behaviors in Inventory.
We came to a decision about the display of “contributor” in the results pane; it will display the first contributor with an ellipsis (…) that links to additional contributors.

In preparation for building data warehouse reports, Reporting SIG members are prioritizing reports by institution within each of the functional areas for reporting. The SIG will also begin the process of assigning a person to each report listed in the FOLIO JIRA system.

The Resource Access SIG is conducting an ongoing review of item states display and patron notifications and overrides for predicted due dates, opening time offsets, skipping closed dates, notice logic and more overrides.

Sys Ops & Mgt SIG had Filip Jakobsen present ideas for a setup wizard for FOLIO, as an UX design prototype. As the code may still undergo major changes, we found that it is a little early to address these questions now. Furthermore, concerns about the complexity of the backend and data mapping were raised. But the wizard could be interesting for smaller libraries who do not want to employ a hosting provider and for SaaS providers. The wizard could be useful to setup locations, loan and patron types, etc.

The Community Outreach SIG has established new processes for conference submissions and meetups. They would like to host a FOLIO Forum to go over these and other Outreach resources and processes. In the meantime, all requests/questions should go through outreach@ole-lists.openlibraryfoundation.org. They created a list of wildflowers and would like to call each new release by a flower name, to make the releases easier to talk about and identify publicly. Since Q4 will be a large release and we plan to do PR around it, we would like to begin to talk about it as Aster. They are still trying to coordinate dates for the next WOLFcon, but it looks like it will be in the Spring, likely April to accommodate the developers’ cadence. The Forum Facilitators subgroup is looking for new members.

The Forum Facilitators SIG announced that registration is open for the next FOLIO Forum on the plan for single tenant consortia; the webinar is on Wednesday, October 17 at 11am Eastern U.S. time.  The next Forum will be on the FOLIO Innovation Grants sponsored by EBSCO; that webinar is scheduled for October 31.

Product owners for loans and acquisitions met with the business process modeling consultant to begin describing workflows for Claimed Returned (UXPROD-1227) and Purchase Suggestions (UXPROD-1228).  The consultant has also begun working with developers from TAMU on integrating the Camunda workflow engine into Okapi.  Several technical issues for the integration have been identified and are being worked on (see UXPROD-1088 for details).