FOLIO Product Council reports that a group called OTS was contracted to review FOLIO’s overall “health” and readiness for multi-tenant implementation. Overall the report was complimentary but did identify some issues that the Tech Council will review over the next couple of weeks. Sharon Beltaine reported on some roadblocks on Reporting development, mostly stemming from inadequate API documentation. Cate and others are contacting developers to upgrade this documentation soon, as it is also affecting other areas. The PC discussed the FOLIO face-to-face but no final conclusions were reached. Will discuss again next week after feedback from a couple of other groups has been gathered.
The FOLIO Technical Counci has had several meetings to discuss the OTS report on FOLIO’s health from a multitenant hosting readiness perspective. We will provide documented feedback for the community the week of February 11th. They also reviewed a presentation and had an initial discussion on Codex. Further debate/discussion is planned.
The Accessibility SIG has two new members: Kevin Kidwell from Cornell who will be heading up Usability Testing for FOLIO, and Abby Baines from Smith College Libraries who will be assisting with new Power Hour accessibility tests each month for different user stories in FOLIO. Welcome!
The Consortia SIG met with Ann-Marie Breaux to discuss the current status of the Data Import app since there is possible overlap with the consortial feature described in UXPROD-1419. Currently, the app works independently within each tenant. No functionality for cross-tenant data imports are in the current plans for the app, and it’s not entirely clear whether there is a use case that requires this. The SIG will follow up on this question to see if a use case exists.
The Metadata Management SIG is practically finished with default MARC mappings for both Instance and Holdings records in Inventory. There are a few outstanding issues, including HRIDs and system control numbers in 001s, and alternate graphic representations. Like RM, we are compiling cases where we would like system alerts & notifications. Information can be found on Discuss: https://discuss.folio.org/t/defining-alerts-notifications-in-inventory-and-marccat/2319
The Reporting SIG discussed possible topics as part of planning for the next WolfCon Folio conference in May. Emma Boettcher, Loans Product Owner, provided a demonstration of her design for the Overdue Loans in-app report she has been working on with the Resource Access SIG. The FOLIO Library Data Platform (LDP) reference data warehouse is now under active development, with initial report building underway and first experimental deployments about to begin. Nassib Nassar has implemented a star schema data model in PostgreSQL to support ease and speed of querying. Roman Ruiz-Esparza has created a sample data generator, which is being used to populate the data warehouse with data for testing reporting data models. Current areas of focus for reporting data model development is circulation, and we are also beginning to look at eUsage.
Sys Ops & Mgt SIG members brought up critical issues in deployment to discuss with the group. The proposal was made to move dependency resolution out of Okapi into a different tool. They see the need to strictly separate the build and run stages. Also, versioning of database schemas in order to be able to upgrade modules is needed. Another wanted feature is a disaster recovery perspective, a way to rollback changes. Data integrity needs to be ensured from release to release. As the system gets bigger, institutions don’t want to deploy the complete platform, i.e. a complete release, but need to be able to pick the modules they need. Dependency resolution needs to be taken care of by some tool.
The Forum Facilitators SIG reports that the recording of the most recent Roadmap Update Forum is on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hnP_y0tOIik. The next Forum is on February 20 covering the projects of the Open Library Foundation.