Meeting Minutes for 10/02/2018

Discovery Committee Meeting
October 02, 2018
Minutes

Demo of new features & bug fixes for upcoming release

• Release Notes
• Code deployment Oct 9, Tuesday evening after MUG
• Code deployments going forward will be on the evenings of the days we hold Discovery Committee meetings

Discussion of development priorities for the next release
Road Map
Current Release

• Addison Implementation
  • Most of the R&D times will be spent on Addison Implementation
• Sacramento Discovery Partner Implementation
  • Now ready to go live
• Will build a modified self-registration process
  • Horizon ROA Driver
  • Will wrap-up Horizon
• AspenCat Migration
  • Will continue on with AspenCat migration
• Lake County Marmot Member Implementation
  • Working on their discovery catalog
  • On-site training is scheduled for October 15th
• Next Release
• New Marmot Team Member
  • New team member either in October or the start of November
  • 1st round of candidate interviews is finished
  • Final candidates will be interviewed the week of October 8th - 12th

Reports from libraries on special projects

• Flatirons upgraded to Sierra 4.0
  • Marmot helped with any upgrade issues for Flatirons
• Arlington upgraded to Sierra 4.0 on October 2nd

MUG 2018 in Grand Junction was October 4th and 5th

• “Hands-On Pika Session” was moved to a computer classroom at CMU in the Tomlinson Library
  • Beth Gallinger and James Staub presented
    • “Why Pika is Awesome”
    • The benefits of using Pika

New Discovery Committee Chair Replacement

• Beth  will not be chair next year
• Think about volunteering!
  • Email Beth at beth-at-flatironslibrary.org
  • Email us at pika-at-marmot.org
• Light workload - sending out reminder emails and agendas, facilitating meetings
  • Ashley will send these out reminders for November

Discussion Topics

• Is it possible to change the labeling for the format categories at the top of search results?
  • These are format categories and not just formats
  • The category is movie that includes formats like DVD, Blu-ray, VHS, etc.
  • Pascal will need to investigate to find out if these categories are changeable
• Spaces as valid characters in patron barcodes
  • Wake County physical printed library cards have spaces
  • Pika will strip spaces from barcodes if they are not valid characters
  • AspenCat libraries do use spaces as valid characters in patron barcodes
  • Pascal is surveying for the exceptions
    • He would like to make it a general practice to strip out internal spaces from patron barcodes
    • He would like to make exceptions for libraries that do have spaces as valid characters
    • The space would be in the patron’s record in their ILS
    • The space would matter when looking up the patron
    • Open up a ticket if the spaces matters to look up a patron’s barcode
• Proposed change verbiage on hold pop-up window
  • Change to just “pick up the title from your library” rather than “pick up the title from your home library”
  • Change to just “delivered to your library” rather than “delivered to your home library”
  • This would be in case they have chosen another branch for their pick up
  • This would help to make sure the patron does not think they still have to pick up the item from their home library or branch, instead of a different branch
  • You can also suggest some different language as well
    • One suggestion was “the library” instead of “your library”
• Date-picker limitation for holds with cancellation dates
  • Not all libraries allow their patrons to choose a cancellation date
  • Would it made sense to limit the hold cancel date to a certain period of time?
    • There was a consensus of a one year cancellation date
  • Would it be an issue if a patron froze a hold, and forgot it past the year cancelation date?
  • Does this cancellation date affect Bookings?
    • This is just an interface change, so it would not apply to Bookings
• Notes for November code deployment
  • The November code will be deployed the night of the Discovery Committee meeting (November 6th)

Other Topics

• Nashville had a question about Google Analytics Instructions
  • Nashville is considering messing around with their Google tracking code
    • Does anyone have Google Analytics instructions that talk analysis with the custom variable pType and home library that Pika tracking.tpl sets up?
    • Nashville is not trying to track.  The default Pika tracker is set up with a few custom variables.
    • Nashville is trying to find them in the analytics interface
  • Beth from Flatirons offered Google Analytic instructions on creating views
    • The instructions are specific for Flatirons

The next Discovery meeting is on Tuesday, November 6th