The FOLIO Technical Council discussed Tech Debt. Discussed documented issues are here. They draft a definition of Tech Debt for the community to use in conversations and planning and will work to finalize a list of prioritized items by April 30 so that it may be considered alongside the rankings of the Implementer Group. They also discussed the FOLIO Working meeting in June. A few items were added to the list of meetings for the TC itself. However, the general consensus was that the meeting won’t be valuable enough to pull all developers in. Some recommendations about planning future conferences were raised. The TC will send summary to the PC for awareness and consideration.
The FOLIO Implementation Group has been formed to allow institutions to work together to address shared implementation concerns. The purpose of this group is described in more detail here. Everyone is welcome! Karen Newbery from Duke University has kindly agreed to be the group’s convener. The first meeting will be on April 9 at 11:00 AM EST. The Zoom link for the meeting is zoom.us/j/244921097. Complete onboarding instructions are available on the group’s wiki. Hope to see you there!
The Consortia SIG met on April 3rd. We talked with representatives from FLO about their recent discussions around FOLIO and possible implementation models (i.e. separate versus shared tenant), especially as it relates to resource sharing and patron management. FLO and other consortia are participating in the UXPROD feature prioritization activity; they’ll share their discussions and questions at the April 17th and 24th meetings. They will also get an update on planned Reshare features at the April 17th meeting.
The Metadata Management SIG reviewed and discussed a proposed solution to what MARC calls “Alternate Graphic Representation,” that is, multiple scripts or labels that represent the same element or object. The proposed solution will require a modification to the existing data model. They still need to provide more examples and start considering how these would display and be edited. Next steps: consult with developers to find out how much work this would require. They also briefly addressed the need to have catalogers with specific format expertise (music, media, and cartographic materials) review data elements in Inventory. A subgroup will begin work shortly on search requirements and enhancements.
The Report Prototype Working Group (a subgroup) provided an update to the larger Reporting SIG on their work to model reports in the LDP reporting data warehouse. They covered reporting data model development so far (circ reports), the database schema, the LDP-Analytics GitHub repository, the web interface, and accessing the database from reporting applications (e.g., Tableau, R, Crystal Reports, and phpPgAdmin). The Reporting SIG also prepared to rank reporting features for the upcoming FOLIO Feature Gap Analysis.
The Sys Ops & Mgt SIG resumed the discussion on what tools for production deployment will be recommended by the group and will be subsequently supported by the whole project. It was pointed out that Docker has known security issues and some might even want to use a VM Ware cluster instead for orchestration. But we should differentiate between orchestration management (done by Kubernetes) and configuration management (which can be done by Ansible and Salt). Helm Charts are not specific to Rancher but can be used by any Kubernetes infrastructure. They are an update path from one release to another. Here is a summary of the issues that the group has encountered so far in production deployment tests:
- Dependency resolution within FOLIO
- Service Discovery – How do we let Okapi know where things are
- Tenant initialization
- The Upgrade Process – How to go from one release to another
The Forum Facilitators SIG reports that registration is available for the next Forums: MARCCat App (April 10) and Project ReShare (April 24).