Minutes for 09/01/2015

Discovery Committee Meeting 1 September, 2015 Minutes

OverDrive and Expired Accounts

• Mark and Alysa summarized the issue with Overdrive and patron expiration dates. Currently, based off Marmot’s request, Overdrive no longer blocks patrons whose accounts have expired. There is still much discussion about this practice among Marmot members, but the topic was brought to this group to explore opportunities within Pika to more prominently display pending and current expiration dates for patrons, as well as the ability to do online account renewals. Mark agreed to add additional alerts to the Pika development backlog, and Jimmy offered to email Overdrive to see if they could offer any solutions on their end (e.g. display expiration date warnings within the Overdrive app).

High Priority Backlog

• Since much of the development in Pika occurred last month, there was no new functionality demo. Mark opened the discussion to see if issues which came up after the deployment were still issues, and if there was anything else. There are still sporadic reports of holds not working in Pika, so Mark requested that people continue to send that information his way, with as much detail as possible, such as the title being requested, patron information, and time of day if possible. Mark also clarified that the new status of “Pending” for holds was new development to help give patrons a better understanding of hold statuses.
• The scoping issues discovered initially after the release have also been resolved, but again let Mark know if you still see any issues. Mark then thought it would be good to discuss the IP address detection functionality in Pika as a follow-up to the email chain regarding this issue. Mark explained that IP detection can generally cause more problems than helping, and there are other/better methods for “detecting” where patrons are in order to control tools such as autologout. In particular, libraries can simply use a specific URL on library workstations which would inform Pika that the patron is in a library. This would also preserve the sorting and availability functionality. Instructions will be sent to libraries in how to construct URL’s for this purpose.
• The next couple of sprints will mostly tackle bugs and outstanding issues, so there will not be a lot of new development.

Next Meeting: Tuesday, October 6, 2015

• Because the online meeting tool we having been using has a maximum of 25 participants and a number of people were not able to join, we will be switching platforms for following meetings. Connection information will be sent with next month’s agenda.