FOLIO Project Update – Week of September 10, 2018

The SIG conveners provided updates to the FOLIO Product Council on the work and progress in their SIG groups. The International SIG is working on technical process of taking international strings of code out of GitHub and returning them to GitHub. The Accessibility SIG has done testing of the UI/UX and their report is available on the wiki. The Reporting SIG’s Product Owner Nassib has created a data platform architecture document and this is being reviewed by the Technical Council and the Reporting SIG. The Metadata Management SIG is working with Filip on a MarcCat app and batch loader. There has been a change in convener: Lisa Furbubotten and Laura Wright are now the conveners. The Resource Management SIG is working on cross functionality between the eholdings app and ERM apps. There was discussion on e-usage statistics; Bjorn offered more information on this development. The User Management SIG is working on several needs of the Resource Access SIG. The Sys Ops SIG is working on deployment and a migration loader. The Special Collections and Archives working group submitted their white paper and it will be ready for review by the PC. The Community Outreach SIG reported that WOLFcon planning is underway and dates are being revised and finalized. The new website is set to go live on Monday, September 17.

The Technical Council received updates from the UI Testing effort. Much progress has been made in the area of UI Testing coverage and build stabilization. Status report is available here. On Thursday we received approval to engage a consultant to lead the Workflow System’s PoC, which will start in early October.

The Accessibility SIG met on Weds, 9/12 to review the updated Accessibility Guidelines document developed by Stephanie Espiand.  Stephanie was asked to add a section on focus and to reference articles on using screen readers for testing. All product owners should review this document and share with their designers and developers.  The second half of the meeting was spent reviewing the results of the first round of accessibility and usability testing on FOLIO performed and documented by the University of Colorado at Boulder lab.  Khalilah Gambrell’s slide deck and summary of the results can be found here.

The Consortia SIG met on September 12th and reviewed two questionnaires. The first was related to the migration of historical data into FOLIO. Review of this questionnaire was completed and will be submitted back to the group working on this by their September 14th deadline. The second is a questionnaire from a consortium with interest in FOLIO. The SIG is still in the process of reviewing and responding to this questionnaire. The SIG also merged its list of reporting needs into the Reporting SIG’s master spreadsheet. We’ll be conducting one final review of these needs before giving the “go-ahead” to load these into Jira.

The Metadata Management SIG viewed the UX work thus far for displaying parent/child instance records for analytics & bound-with materials. A proposed new element for the Instance record in Inventory – nature of contents – was discussed. This proposal for a new element comes from efforts to map Inventory data to Codex terms generated from the EBSCO Knowledge Base. Nature of contents is an RDA element that has already been implemented in German libraries. There was no consensus about this element, but it was agreed that to do some test implementations and discuss further.

Nassib Nassar, Reporting Product Owner of the Reporting SIG, reviewed his technical design document, Library Data Architecture Platform for FOLIO, which provides an outline for the requirements, architecture, and implementation of an environment to support the extensive data analysis and reporting needs of institutions implementing FOLIO. Also, to support the initial steps for development of a reporting data warehouse environment, a small workgroup has formed to prototype some simple reports in the functional areas of loans, inventory, and users. Joanne Leary walked us through the first 2 prototypes: Circulation Detail Report and Item Detail Report. Report prototypes will be used to build data models for the structure of data in the data warehouse.  We also welcomed 2 new members: Angela Zoss (Duke) and Veit Koppen (Magdeburg).

The Resource Access SIG reviewed requirements for user-related, loan action, and item-related data elements.  They also prepared responses to questions about historical data needs and have begun consideration of the need for the ability to make policy changes to active loans.

The User Management SIG reviewed UXPROD-4 and determined that it wasn’t really a User management issue.  They recommend finding the folks who first asked for it and figuring out exactly what functionality would be enabled by the service point data (is this a patron issue, a staff issue?)  If it has access control implications, or implications on patron data feeds, it may become a UM-SIG issue once again.