Meeting Minutes for 11/06/2018

Discovery Committee Meeting
November 6, 2018
Minutes

Introducing our new Developer, Chris Froese

  • Chris is learning more about what Marmot does for its members
  • He looks forward to digging in and working with all the Marmot members

Welcome Lake County Public Library as newest Marmot Library

  • Their official go live was on October 31, 2018

Welcome Addison Public Library to Discovery Committee

  • The R&D team is leaving for a site visit tomorrow, Wednesday, November 7th to Addison Public Library
  • Addison Public Library is in Addison, Illinois which is a Chicago suburb
  • The R&D team will be in Illinois until Friday
  • R & D is excited to have them as Marmot’s newest Discovery Partner

Demo of new features, bug fixes, and documentation for upcoming release

  • Pika team will be out of the office from November 7-9 (Monday is a holiday), so deployment will be November 13th
  • Release Notes

Marmot strategic planning related to Pika with Adam Murray

  • Adam talked about the Pika business plan and the overall strategic plan for Marmot
  • Marmot went through a very aggressive growth period with Pika  
    • What Marmot found out about this aggressive growth period is that it strained the staff server room that  supports Pika
  • The direction for Pika that Marmot is going to be taking is to take all of 2019 to develop and implement a strategic planning process
  • Adam will be sharing and discussing the timeline for that strategic planning process with the Marmot Board on Friday, November 9th
  • Once the strategic plan is approved by the Board, Adam will be sharing it on the Allpoints listserv and with the Discovery Partners, so everyone is aware of the timeline for this strategic process
  • Adam will be soliciting a lot of feedback
    • The plan is to conduct a 360 evaluation of Marmot, its services and products
    • Taking the information from the 360 evaluation to develop an overall  business plan for Marmot, and specifically for Pika
  • Adam is also looking at the fact that the R&D team have been stretched so thin with implementation from this aggressive implementation timeline
  • Since Marmot is going to be doing the strategic plan through 2019 , Adam has decided that Marmot is not going to be taking on any new Discovery Partners throughout 2019
    • Marmot will only take on the Discovery Partners they have already committed to for 2019
  • Marmot will have to see what happens with the strategic planning process with the data and feedback that comes from all of our members and Discovery Partners, and figure out what implications that data and feedback has for Marmot’s business model
  • It has been awhile since Marmot has conducted a full 360 evaluation
    • Adam would like to make sure that Marmot includes feedback opportunities to not just the library directors, but also the librarians and library staff at the member libraries, and Discovery Partners libraries on Marmot services and products
    • Really being able to take a deep dive into the performance and where we see the future of Marmot
    • Marmot will be looking at a lot of data, and being in communication with a lot of different people
    • Announcements will be made as we near the end of the year
    • Marmot is at a great place to do this very thorough examination and come out stronger that we have been

R&D Team Plan for 2019

  • The R&D team, while the Marmot leadership level is working on strategic planning, would like to focus on fundamentals
    • Search and record grouping
    • Most important is to start working on the backlog

Discussion of development priorities for the next release

Current Release

  • Addison Implementation

    • Most of the R&D time will be spent on Addison Implementation
    • Onsite visit is November 7 - 9th for in person training
    • Scheduled go live is sometime in December

  • Horizon ROA Driver

    • Almost done
    • Just have to make a couple of adjustments
    • Working on their self registration

  • AspenCat Migration

    • Will continue on with AspenCat migration

  • New Team Member Onboard

    • Chris will be given tasks to help clean up back end stuff
    • This will be a good opportunity for Chris to learn the code and the interconnections
    • Chris will be given the question tickets to get back to members with answers

Next Quarter

  • Sacramento Discovery Partner Implementation
    • Go live has been moved to January 2, 2019
  • Aurora Implementation
    • 1st quarter of 2019
  • Bemis Library Marmot Implementation
    • 1st quarter of 2019
  • Focus on topic priority bugs
    • Go to the YouTrack ticket system and let the R&D team know which bugs are important to you
    • R&D will do some grooming of the the backlog of bugs and categorize them, and get as many as they can fixed in 2019
  • Sierra API Extract
  • Integrate Hoopla APIs

Short Term

  • Sierra API Patron Integration
    • After Sierra API and Hoopla API integrations
    • This is all the checkouts, placing holds and account integrations    

Long Term

  • Sierra Periodicals Trouble
    • Information is through screen scraping
    • Would like to replace screen scraping with calls to the API
  • Record Grouping Adjustments
    • In 2019, do improvements to record grouping
    • Make foreign language a new factor in record grouping
    • To prevent the spanish version of a title does not group with the english version

Reports from libraries on special projects

  • James from Nashville is scheduled to work on non-English stuff in Pika during November. For Nashville there are issues in Carl and he believes (but does not know) there is a Pika bug in reindexer. James would love to work with you all in online working meetings.

  • Holly from Lake County shared that they are having an Open House next week to introduce Pika and Marmot to their community

New Discovery Committee Chair - Need by December meeting!

  • We need a volunteer!

    • Email Beth at beth@flatironslibrary.org
    • Email us at pika@marmot.org
    • Light workload - sending out reminder emails and agendas, facilitating meetings
    • If we could get someone by December or January, Beth can walk you through process

Discussion Topics

  • Creating general ‘default’ browse categories that scope to branch/system holdings
    • Mostly for Marmot members, but can be used by other consortium
    • Only get one default library per install
      • If you only have one library system this may not be as useful
      • If you have several libraries, you can assign browse categories to the default library
        • If the other libraries in your system do not have browse categories, they can borrow from the default library
      • These browse categories can be scoped to the local library’s holdings, so the display of items is more specific to your collection
      • Curious if this might be useful for libraries in consortial settings where you build one good set of default browse categories, and they are easier to apply
      • You do not have to borrow from the default library
        • If you like just one of the browse categories, you can use just that one or more along with all of your other browse categories
      • R&D would like to clean up some of the browse categories that no one is using or do not work
      • R&D wants to offer build these browse categories for libraries in consortial settings
        • If so, send an email to pika-at-marmot.org
    • Question from AspenCat
      • In the future, could we have a wiki where people could put their browse categories
      • Would this allow people to copy the information?
        • Ashley cautioned that we would have to be mindful of the scoping that might happen when a browse category is created from a page
          • It is a good idea since most categories are created using the same filters
          • It is a good idea to keep a list of browse categories that people like so they can copy and paste them into your own categories

  • RBdigital URL updates - Old links will be good until February 4, 2019

    • Some libraries received mailers and/or emails from RBdigital about URL updates for eBooks and eAudiobooks
    • There is a possibility that some of the URLs in the 856 fields from the older RBdigital (OneClick) records may or may not need to be replaced
    • R&D does have some functionality to do URL replacements for side loads in Pika
    • Marmot talked to the MARC record support people at RBdigital about eMagazines
      • According to the support people this change will not affect eMagazines
    • If you have RBdigital eBooks and eAudiobooks check your staff view for the 856 links.  If they still have the old OneClick URLs after February 4, 2019, let R&D know about them

        

The next Discovery meeting is on Tuesday, December 4th

 
Meeting Date: 
Tuesday, 2018, November 6
Documentation Type: 
Meeting Minutes
Link to File: 
Discovery Meeting Minutes for 11.06.2018
Committees: 
Discovery Committee