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[35 total ]
user friendly staff interface for creating new circ modifiers & marc templates - for a start

Posted 12 months ago by fosterk

As stated in:
http://list.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-dev/2008-June/003117...
the way to do this is to add to the config files in /openils/conf/opensrf.xml
We would want ordinary shmoes like me to be able to add a circ modifier & cataloguing staff to be able to make a new marc template.

Conifer Implementation

Posted 12 months ago by jbfink

Issues related to Conifer

Status update: 2008-12-10

Posted 12 months ago by dscott

John Fink

The project issue tracker is alive, and ready for the testing / feedback groups to start making use of it
Will resume tackling loading holdings on Thursday and Friday of this week
Will disappear from anything resembling ... [More] work from December 18th through January 5th

Dan Scott

Posted a suggestion for how the testing / feedback / policy groups should proceed to encourage maximum efficiency and innovative approaches to achieving institutional goals; we'll see how that's received
Initiated discussions about standard documentation licensing for Evergreen, given the convergence of the four MATC award-funded writers and our incoming technical writer we'll want to have compatible licenses and encourage other community members to make their documentation available under compatible licenses
Simplified the Apache configuration files to support all locales in the form xx-YY in the future
Automated configuration of i18n support for installed languages in the staff client
Implemented a standardized method of supporting staff client style customizations (*_custom.css) that can survive system upgrades
Answered a number of astute questions from our incoming technical writer; we are very lucky to have her
Committed a DocBook 5.0 documentation sample composed of separate files as a proof of concept for a real documentation build - it's not really all that difficult to build and maintain; also discussed documentation plans in general with Karen Schneider of Equinox [Less]

Status update: 2008-12-05

Posted 12 months ago by dscott

Project update for the week of December 5th, 2008:

John Fink

Interviewed two candidates for the technical writing co-op position with Dan on Monday (despite illness)
Offer has been made to the candidate for the technical writing ... [More] co-op position for January - April 2009. Better yet, the offer was accepted and the candidate started asking questions to get up to speed in advance.

Art Rhyno

Continuing to make progress on SYRUP (academic reserves). Expects that even the loosely coupled iteration should be able to use stackable authentication to authenticate against Evergreen account so that "My reserves/My classes" can be integrated into "My Account" view in Evergreen. Silos are tumbling.
Hopes to have something we can run and demonstrate in time for the January 15th training sessions
Expects to dig into some Python - OpenSRF integration in the New Year

Dan Scott

Interviewed two candidates for the technical writing co-op position with John on Monday; provided John with typical wage range for Seneca co-op writers to support the offer
Wrote up draft minutes from November 27th planning meeting and circulated for comments
Updated holdings import packages and tested against OpenSRF/Evergreen trunk
Confirmed trainer availability for mid-January and end of January (OLA SuperConference), as requested at planning meeting
Confirmed Bill's availability for end of January training session (quick overview of acquisitions and Vandelay; "quick", hah)
Confirmed trainer availability for a mid-December training session in Windsor, as subsequently requested
Worked with Mike and Bill to debug Vandelay import open-ils.ingest process exhaustion problems on resource-constrained systems
Supported Scott McKellar's development of support for UTF-8 encoding of Unicode characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane; provided test data, pointers to further resources and similar implementation efforts, then tested and merged Scott's patches
Gave a well-received 3.5 hour-long Conifer update presentation and demo to librarians at Laurentian University [Less]

Project planning meeting minutes: 2008-11-27

Posted 12 months ago by dscott

Introductions - play the "match the voice to the person" game.
Adoption of agenda
Review action items from last meeting:

Dan to tally capital costs to date (servers, personnel, etc).

Dan made an initial high-level tally ... [More] available from the Project Expenses page and circulated it to the group well before the meeting. On the call, the group thought it was a good start but requested finer grained information.

FOLLOW UP: Get travel, teleconferencing, etc expenses as well (ability to estimate and recoup costs from new members)
FOLLOW UP: Create a page on the Google Group so that each person can update directly, rather than flowing through Dan
FOLLOW UP: Add regular personnel costs (this pushes it into Google Docs by-invitation-only territory as we're starting to deal with much more sensitive information)

ACTION: Dan to ask Victoria Edwards (Laurentian FIPPA contact) contact Jim Lennie to start setting up SLA terms for FIPPA compliance.
Dan still needs to follow up with Victoria.

ACTION: Dan to circulate notice of collection drafted by Victoria Edwards at Laurentian to NOHIN, other Laurentian affiliates.
Dan needs to follow up.

ACTION: All sites to get NOC out there so that we can feel comfortable loading patron records onto Guelph servers.
STATUS/FOLLOW UP: Nothing at Windsor, Algoma, Laurentian, McMaster yet

ACTION: Shift Graham to academic reserves development.
STATUS: http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS-Contrib/wiki/SyrupReserves

ACTION: Dan to ask about ability to share reporting templates on list. Dan posted question at http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.education.libraries.open-ils.devel/2361, there was a follow up from one of the Equinox employees who was also interested in the answer, but there has been no further response
FOLLOW UP: Dan to follow up on list; possibly just create a report and see what gets generated in the database. Because all of Evergreen's data is in the database, other tools such as Crystal Reports, Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) are also possibilities.

ACTION: Dan to contact a possible trainer, CC Anne and Cathy.
Dan arranged for a trainer for November 28th but cancelled as requested by Anne and Cathy.

ACTION: Ask BC how they share responsibilities for migrating data with Equinox, as they seem to be migrating some of their own.
Dan posted response at http://groups.google.com/group/ontario-evergreen/browse_thread/thread/21...

ACTION: Find out whether there is a charge for the validation of migrated data.
Dan posted response at http://groups.google.com/group/ontario-evergreen/browse_thread/thread/7c...

Human resources update

Algoma

eServices librarian hiring process; candidate with a programming background who is a librarian has been recommended to the President
if the offer has not been made by the end of this week, Ken will stand in the President's office until the offer is sent out
hopes the candidate will be able to start in January, hit OLA SuperConference and meet all the players, and get rolling full-time on Conifer as of February

Tech writer co-op

Interviews set up on Monday for two candidates - to start in January

Michael Klein

ACTION: Dan to dig up expected cost for Michael

Graham Fawcett

Has been making good progress over the last few weeks on reserves.

CUFTS conference call
Background: There have been a few discussions about whether there are any synergies between CUFTS and Evergreen. CUFTS is a serials management system developed for COPPUL consortium. Mark Leggott has been using CUFTS for serials management at UPEI and has been advocating the use of CUFTS as a solution for serials support in Evergreen. A conference call was held with a number of participants, partially looking for development partners and adoption.

There was no real agreement on the call that CUFTS would be part of the serials solution for Evergreen. The ERM piece of CUFTS may solve a problem that some sites have with Verde or other solutions that force you to work with two systems.

Acquisitions part of serials needs integration: How do we pay for a subscription; for example, there may be a separate PO; or the subscription may be part of a package?

Serials acquisitions support is on the roadmap, but we might not get there when we go live so having a backup (via CUFTS, say) would be good.

ACTION: Dan to ask Kevin for demo accounts for Art, Karen, and Cathy.
ACTION: Suncat - Fred Guy at University of Edinburgh - get him an account as well (requested by Art)

Review the revised Guelph hosting proposal

Directors had a conference call about a week ago to clarify the Guelph agreement. There may have been some early miscommunication about Guelph's participation. Free support during development phase but chargebacks.

Costs reduced to $XX per year, but for a two year commitment at a minimum.

Anne read through the old and new agreement and determined that the only differences are the removal of the compliance with terms of use for Guelph and the cost and commitment requirement

Guelph needs to know ASAP so they can plan for the work (either for HR purposes at Guelph, or for moving the servers to the new hosting place).

For adding new partners or a reasonable number of new servers, there would be no additional charges from Guelph. Gwen might have one-time money to do some work, but is concerned about the long-term costs. Lionel noted that we have to pay someone something to host it, no matter what.

Guelph needs to hear something before Christmas. We're okay with paying Guelph, we just need to know what we're paying for and have to be okay in the long term so that we can understand annual cost of operations.

ACTION: Someone to communicate to Guelph that we're going ahead with them as the host.

Migration
McMaster would prefer to migrate their own data, and have formed their own group to look at the issues - but what does that do to the consortial migration model?

ACTION: Can we slice and dice? What will that do to our costs?
ACTION: Dan to find out about the total estimate for migration - does that include deduping costs or not?
Dan tracked down the answer after the call, the deduping fee is on top of the bib migration.

QUESTION: What happens if it (migration) doesn't work?

Breakdown by institution:

McMaster - will probably migrate their own data; their portion of the migration charge is a large chunk of change
ACTION: Dan to ask James Fournie / Brandon Uhlmann to contact info to Paul to talk about migration experiences and gotchas

Windsor - expenses are a concern, but would want to get help from Equinox
Algoma - has limited human resources and will go with Equinox
Laurentian - will go with Equinox
NOHIN - will probably follow Laurentian's lead and go with Equinox

Training - what is our plan now?
Impression at October meeting of Windsor and McMaster focal points was that it would be too soon to have a large group training session; preference to start with a smaller group to provide feedback to system developers. Basically a train-the-trainer session to become focal points for the system feedback and development.

Ron would be interested in having a training session at Laurentian mid-January

OLA timing?

Aim for January 28th - directors will be there for a mid-winter meeting, so there's a bit of a conflict but we'll try to get as many staff there as possible
Art thinks that we could get FIS as a facility
Algoma hire will probably be able to attend
ACTION: Dan to ask Bill if he will be able to provide acquisitions and Vandelay updates, as he will be in town for OLA anyway
ACTION: Dan will check with trainer for mid-January session up North
(follow up from Dan) It's a go with trainer, just need to finalize which date
ACTION: Dan to find out if trainer is available for the 28th - staff client (circulation, cataloging, reserves); Bill for acquisitions and Vandelay and whatever else is there
(follow up from Dan): This is also a go. Bill will be arriving in TO on Wednesday at 2:30 pm and is game for whatever we ask, earliest that he could make it downtown from the airport will probably be around 4:00 pm

Status of the reserve module
Art and Graham have been making significant progress on an initial implementation, based on ReservesDirect. They hope to have something that people can poke at by the end of December.

Why not ReservesDirect?

It does not currently support internationalization
PHP MySQL doesn't fit well with Evergreen's Perl / PostgreSQL

Circulation (how do we address recalls?)
Recalls = like a hold, but triggers notification new (shorter) due date new fine rules; there are staff-generated vs. patron-generated recall workflows that differ by institution

ACTION: Karen Foster to describe how recalls work today for McMaster

General consensus that the minimum go-live requirements is the ability to generate recalls in the staff interface

McMaster may also need to offer the ability to place holds on items that are not checked-out for offering request services
To get this done:

We will need to prioritize development priorities, across all of the partners, given our limited resources

What do we do now about the technical writer co-op position?

We have two more candidates from Seneca after all. Yay! John and Dan will be interviewing them on Monday, Dec. 1. This person will primarily be writing documentation to cover our needs, but will be working with the four writers that Equinox has hired to ensure that there is not too much overlap of content.

ACTION: Dan to post list of what is being documented by Equinox

Review of costs to date
Mostly covered by follow-up to last meeting.

ACTION: Dan to check into recommendations for production hardware from Equinox

ACTION: Michael to get NOHIN FTE and send to Anne for consortial cost-sharing formula

Next meeting:
The group agreed to hold a phone meeting on January 12th, 2009. [Less]

Status update: 2008-11-26

Posted about 1 year ago by dscott

John Fink

Holdings import: successfully ran the import demo scripts last week but couldn't find any resulting holdings in the instance on comet. Dan offered a few SQL statements to help debug the problem ("SELECT COUNT (*) FROM ... [More] biblio.record_entry;" / "SELECT * FROM biblio.record_entry WHERE id > 1 LIMIT 1;") and offered to help if John runs into any other roadblocks.
Tech writer co-op update: there are two telephone interviews scheduled for Monday morning. We have candidates, yay! Dan will join in on the call and generate a list of reasonable interview questions.
To facilitate the Conifer testing/feedback teams, John will set up an issue tracker on the Project Conifer Drupal site [Less]

Status update: 2008-11-21

Posted about 1 year ago by dscott

Art Rhyno

Art has been forging ahead with Graham on the academic reserves support; likelihood is that the end product (at least for May) will be a loosely-coupled application with Conifer, so some customization of the My Account pages, etc ... [More] , will have to be used to pull in info from a separate application and deal with authentication, etc; but given the limited runway for development time that's perfectly acceptable

Dan Scott

Created a new mailing list for the testing / feedback group to discuss issues - all of the test/feedback co-ordinators have the ability to add members so Dan can't be a bottleneck:
Dan has invested a fair bit of time trying to resolve some Unicorn issues
Also has been putting in time on other library-related infrastructure planning
Ergo not much Conifer progress to report [Less]

Status update: 2008-11-19

Posted about 1 year ago by dscott

John Fink

There may be a few more candidates for the tech writer co-op position after all; John is following up with Seneca.
Just starting to install Evergreen 1.4 on comet, per 2008-10-29.
No progress on loading holdings ... [More] yet.

Dan Scott

Dan sent a flurry of messages to the list earlier in the week chasing down action items from the last project planning meeting.

Next Conifer project planning meeting will likely be November 27th; only NOHIN has not responded to the call for availability.
Cancelled our trainer for the week of November 28th. Ironically, within a dozen hours I started receiving questions about Evergreen functionality from one of the testing/feedback groups that would best be answered by a training session.
Requested feedback on a beta version of a new "skin" for the Evergreen catalogue (Rosie).
Re-raised the open issues of cost-sharing agreements and lead institution.
Tracked down some more answers about migration costs for do-it-ourself vs. contracted out
Updated the expenses incurred to date information to reflect some of the expenses incurred by Windsor so far.

Put in lots of work preparing for the OpenSRF 1.0.1 and Evergreen 1.4.0.0 RC2 releases. Support for translation of all interfaces is largely complete (for real!) [Less]

Status update: 2008-11-14

Posted about 1 year ago by dscott

John Fink

No progress on installing Evergreen 1.4 on comet
No progress on loading holdings
Bad news: it looks like the four applicants for our tech writer co-op position have already found employment. So we might not have a tech ... [More] writer co-op student after all.

Dan Scott

Participated on Algoma's search committee for an e-services librarian on Tuesday / Wednesday. Ken wants this person to be able to join the project and go full steam ahead on Conifer development, hopefully early in the new year.
Set up the ILS-Contrib accounts and directory for Graham and Art's work on the new academic reserves module
Merged internationalization patches for the reports interface and cleared up some bugs that internationalization had introduced into the administration and reports interfaces. Also worked with Jason Etheridge to add a locale-switcher to the staff client interface.

Art Rhyno
Art began working with Graham on implementing the academic reserves prototype, codenamed "SYRUP". The initial implementation will be built on Django using the Genshi templating system and Babel internationalization support. The initial implementation will be based on a quick port of ReservesDirect, which hits most of the requirements captured in the Evergreen academic reserves requirements document that Dan had pulled together this summer. More information about the direction that Graham and Art are currently headed can be found at http://open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=scratchpad:reserves [Less]

Minutes from 2008-10-22 Project Conifer meeting

Posted about 1 year ago by dscott

Project Conifer Meeting
Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
McMaster University
Attendees: John Fink, Ken Hernden, Jim Lennie, Cathy Maskell, Paul Otto, Anne Pottier, Art Rhyno, Dan Scott

Agenda

Adoption of agenda ... [More]

Move “Conifer cost-sharing” discussion to first on the agenda after introductions to enable Patty Fink to participate

Introductions

Patty Fink (unfortunately, video-conferencing prevented Patty from being able to join us)

Cost sharing agreement (Paul, Cathy, Ken, Patty?)

No progress since August, but the group started looking at the TUG agreement (http://staff.tug-libraries.on.ca/documents/costsharingdoc.html – part of the TUG documents at http://staff.tug-libraries.on.ca/documents/documents.html) as a good basis for a model

It will be difficult to align FTE metrics for the universities with metrics for hospitals, although for now they will fall under the responsible partners' umbrella

Goal: focus on the needs for the next 3 years as Conifer as we know might change significantly

ACTION: Dan to tally capital costs to date (servers, personnel, etc)

Guelph servers – Service Level Agreement (Jim Lennie)

Draft SLA has been forwarded

Rough estimate of $80 - $95K annual charges for hosting

The earlier we can enable Guelph to plan for our go-live dates (May 2009), the better; also, the earlier we can start acquiring any additional servers required for production, the better (so that they can provision and test the servers well in advance)

Need to add language about bandwidth costs (included), redundancy, off-site backups to Waterloo commercial service provider, and FIPPA compliance

Will need the capability to generate email with From: headers from different domains (e.g. desmarais@laurentian.ca or conifer@uwindsor.ca or the like) – possibly satisfied by SMTP to each institution's email servers rather than being mailed from the Guelph servers

ACTION: ask Victoria Edwards (Laurentian FIPPA contact) contact Jim Lennie to start setting up SLA terms for FIPPA compliance

(Related to Guelph, but broader): Memorandum of Agreement

To avoid having each participating institution vet contracts, etc with their legal departments, we need a single institution to act as the lead and to charge back proportional costs to the other partners

There is a precedent for this with other OCUL initiatives

Having a single point of contact would be helpful for Guelph as well

FIPPA compliance (required for hosting information on 3rd party servers – and this is not just for Conifer but covers other services like RefWorks and RACER for which we might not currently meet FIPPA standards)

FIPPA notice of collection – sufficient posting and advertisement by all institutions? Victoria Edwards at Laurentian had contacted FIPPA officer (or delegates) at Algoma, McMaster, and Windsor and sent them a draft Notice of Collection (NOC) as a labour-saving device.

As a reminder, the idea is to post the NOC like CanCopy forms and include it on applications for library accounts, send it out to alumni, etc, to prove that we've done due diligence in attempting to inform our users about our policies

ACTION: Dan to circulate notice of collection drafted by Victoria Edwards at Laurentian to NOHIN, other Laurentian affiliates

ACTION: All sites to get NOC out there so that we can feel comfortable loading patron records onto Guelph servers

Human resources update:

Contractor status (Dan)

Graham Fawcett began working in September and contributed his first patch to the project (Vandelay user interface for bibliographic attributes editor) in September, but recovering from the strike at Windsor has kept him out of the loop for the last two weeks

Michael Klein received contract last week, was scheduled to get a brain dump from Michael Giarlo on the state of EDI and Evergreen this past weekend

Algoma e-services librarian status (Ken)

Hiring committee has met and selected candidates for interviews

Interviews will hopefully be held in the first week or two of November

Candidate will hopefully be able to start in early February

Plan is for Ken and others at Algoma to take on most of the e-resource licensing load for the initial six months or so to enable the e-services librarian to contribute to Conifer as much as possible

Tech writer co-op student (John)

Received four applications, with almost unanimous consent as to the preferred candidates

John is scheduling interview time slots at McMaster, Dan will participate via telephone

Laurentian student (Dan)

Craig Ricciuto has returned after his summer placement with us and will be directed to complete internationalization work first

Other possible tasks will be to create a testing framework, customize staff client UI, ...

Evergreen development status (Dan)

First 1.4 release candidate came out on Friday October 17th

Includes record importer/exporter/overlay interface and revamped administration tools

Includes reminder notices

No user interface for in-database circulation rules

Still a handful of interfaces to internationalize

Missing contributed languages because Dan was on the road when the release was being put together

In general the release candidate was a bit rough around the edges (Dan cobbled together install documentation after the release; release tarball wasn't actually tested by anyone before being made public; database upgrade scripts aren't complete)

Evergreen 2.0 has now been merged to trunk, meaning that the default development effort is now focused on academic reserves, acquisitions, and serials

Academic reserves: no progress since August

Acquisitions: to simplify install and configuration dependencies, shift from Python Pylons templates to Perl Template::Toolkit templates

Serials: minimal progress towards an MFHD parser (needed for predictions

ACTION: the group feels that completing the circulation system with academic reserves is a higher priority than serials, so shift Graham to academic reserves development

Documentation:

Reporting documentation is being written by Sally Murphy (funded by Mellon Award)

Equinox will fund acquisitions documentation

(Not on agenda): Overdue and reminder notices

As of 1.4 these are simply scripts that are scheduled to generate email at a regular interval

UPEI did some work to generate mailable notices

(Not on agenda): Reporting module

The reporting module is intended for administrative reporting (statistics, etc), not for generating notices or altering system state

A set of standard reporting templates has been shared between some institutions

Q. Are these only available for Equinox-supported libraries? Dan thinks its just that there's no good mechanism for sharing report templates currently and that it's easier for Equinox to just set them up when they bring a new library on board, but he will ask on the list

ACTION: Dan to ask about reporting templates on list

Server data loading status (John, Dan)

comet, dwarf, and starburst have all been set up with bibliographic records

no holdings loaded yet

John hasn't had time to try loading the 10,000 item records that Karen generated for him

Windsor still needs to provide item records

Dan hasn't had time to load the Laurentian holdings

no patrons loaded yet

partially blocked by need to satisfy FIPPA notification

we can move forward if we create a representative set of patron records by taking a sample of real records and replacing any identifying information with fake information

We will reconfigure the servers as follows:

comet – track rel_1_4 branch (most stable for testing groups)

dwarf – track trunk (will include acquisitions interfaces)

starburst – track trunk experimentation (alternate PostgreSQL configuration, etc)

Cross-site feedback groups (Anne, Cathy)

Hold a face-to-face meeting week of November 24th with representatives from each site's internal groups (circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, ?) to build trust and kick off cross-site efforts

Arrange for concurrent training if possible

Algoma, NOHIN likely won't be able to attend; Dan won't be able to attend in person as that's getting into the danger zone of baby delivery

ACTION: Dan to contact a possible trainer, CC Anne and Cathy

Equinox: support and migration contract (Dan)

Equinox strongly advises against this, but if McMaster decides to migrate their own data, then Equinox requires that a copy of the migrated data be available for inspection two months prior to going live; if changes are required, Equinox will charge an hourly rate to clean up the data

Each additional organizational unit added will result in a slight increase in the annual support fee

As their first real academic large customer, it's a learning experience for Equinox

Much discussion about the pros and cons of trying to migrate our own data, or subsets of it, vs. contracting that effort out to Equinox (for example, building expertise migrating Voyager systems may pay off a few years down the road as there are other academics in the province running Voyager that might want to migrate)

ACTION: Ask BC how they share responsibilities for migrating data with Equinox, as they seem to be migrating some of their own

ACTION: Find out whether there is a charge for the validation of migrated data

Next meeting: December 4th? We need to move to monthly meetings

Reminder that Dan will probably be (mostly) incommunicado from mid-December to mid-January [Less]