FOLIO Project Update – Week of September 3, 2018

The FOLIO Product Council reviewed two options for proceeding with a Proof of Concept for the Workflow Engine proposal.  The PC opted for hiring an outside consultant rather than taking FOLIO developers off current work.  The PC is sending a request for funding to the Stakeholders group.

The first draft report on accessibility testing of FOLIO was received this week and will be discussed during the next Accessibility SIG meeting on 9/12/18.  A brief summary of who and what was tested follows:

Testing conducted August 21 – August 28, 2018:

  • Blind tester on Windows 10 and JAWS 18 / Google Chrome 68.0.3440.106
  • Blind tester on Windows 10 and NVDA xx / Google Chrome 68.0.3440.106
  • Low vision tester on Windows 10 with 300% magnification / Google Chrome 68.0.3440.106
  • Sighted test administrator: JAWS & NVDA / Windows 10 / Google Chrome, when needed to verify behavior.

Testing included:

  • Logging into and out of the system
  • Navigating the initial landing page of the system
  • Accessing various “apps” from the tool bar.
  • Searching and refining the search for specific holdings
  • Editing and interacting with various holdings

The accessibility lab only tested a few features (applications) initially, and will test more later, as determined by the SIG.

The Consortia SIG continued its review of consortial reporting needs at its September 5th meeting. They are nearing the end of that review and will be merging identified needs into the Reporting SIG’s master spreadsheet of reporting needs over the next week. The SIG also began considering historical data migration needs that are specific to the functions of consortia.

The Batch Loader group  of the Metadata Management SIG continues to make progress and is now working with some sample files. They devoted most of the MM SIG meeting this week to demo and discussion of OCLC Connexion for MARC editing to help inform the development of MARCcat.

The Reporting SIG did not meet due to the Labor Day holiday in the U.S. Nassib Nassar, Reporting PO, has outlined the basic architecture for a Library Data Platform (LDP) to be developed for the FOLIO project for the purpose of supporting reporting on data extracted from FOLIO applications as well as the integration of external library data. This provides the technical specifications needed for the development of the reference data warehouse. We will discuss the LDP in the next Reporting SIG meeting on 9/10/18 as well as the report prototypes that are being created to support the development of this new architecture.

The Sys Ops & Mgt SIG covered two agenda items this week. Jason Root of Texas A&M (TAMU) gave a presentation about the first item: FOLIO deployment with Rancher 2.0 and Kubernetes and the experiences the TAMU group gained with that. Jason provided a document showing his deployment steps. He also provided tips for a successful deployment in this document. This document will be used as the basis for a GitHub repo which will share the deployment prescription and also share  automation scripts and YAML files.

The subsequent discussion on his presentation touched on using Okapi to control the module dependencies. This functionality needs to be extended in order to be employed in the TAMU setup.

The second agenda item was about the development of the Migration Loaders. They may be developed in parallel or on top of the Batch Importers, or as a separate effort. Patty and Tod have identified three differences in the requirements for the two kinds of loaders. It was agreed that the ongoing work on the Batch Importers will be finished and that the Migration Loaders will then be developed on top of them, using the same technology stack. The additional requirements of the migration loaders will be formulated as user stories for the Batch Importer JIRA epic. These requirements are, in short: 1. Flat import files. 2. A scripting tool. 3. Higher Performance

The User Management SIG reconvened after an August hiatus.  They discussed user data fields that have been requested, looked at the historical data migration questionnaire, and reviewed user permission screens.