Meeting Minutes for 04/07/2020

Discovery Committee Meeting
April 7, 2020
Minutes

Introducing our new developer!

• Marmot rehired someone who has quite a bit of experience with Marmot.
• The new employee is C.J. O’Hara.
• C.J. was the individual that brought VuFind to Marmot’s attention. This was the beginning steps of  Marmot seriously looking at VuFind, and eventually leading to the development of Pika.
• C.J. has kept up with his software development skills.  He has worked for the City of Grand Junction. He has continued to maintain VuFind for Colorado Mesa University.   
• Marmot is thrilled to welcome him back to the team.  He is currently familiarizing himself with Pika. He will also be investigating a current version of VuFind to see if it can be offered to the academics.
• C.J. is absolutely thrilled to be back at Marmot.

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

• Release Notes

Record Grouping improvements in project progress (Minute 25:26)

• Progress document
• The top of the document has basic information to help explain what happens during the grouping.
•  The grouping factors generate the grouping ID.
• Every bib that has the same grouping ID becomes the collective part of the group work.
• The reason another server is being used during the improvement process is that the group work ID may change with each modification for a particular record.
• The group work ID is used to track what you have in your user list and reading history.
• The Discovery Partners will be added to the server and will have a specific view with just their record sets.
• All the manual merging and unmerging have been removed from this server, so Marmot can look at what the algorithm does on its own.  These examples can be used as test cases to see if grouping is improving or more work needs to be done.
• The focus this month was on the grouping language in the 008, and the grouping author.
• The focus when it comes to authors was to normalize the information so they group better.
• The team uncovered examples where the typical normalization processes in the programming language ignored a few special Unicode characters. These Unicode characters will need special handling to decompose. 
• Another normalization bug was failing to deal with ampersands in the title of a record. 
• The initial format determination process for indexing and grouping will be the same. Currently, they need to implement libraries that have a different format determination method from the default (material type and itype.)  This is still in progress.
• It would be very beneficial if everyone looked at the testing servers (opac3.marmot.org) to see how things are displaying and report any issues.  This is the time to look for issues because when this goes into production changes cannot be made.  Send an email to pika@marmot.org or open a ticket if you find any issues.

Discussion of development priorities for the next release 

• Road Map

Current Release

• Implement RBDigital magazine APIs
  • Patron integration for the next release
• Stability Version - Record Grouping: Language & Category
  • This project is mostly completed
• Stability Version - Record Grouping: Improved handling for grouping Category: Movie
  • This is the next project in the grouping series
• Admin user options project
  • C.J. will be working on the tickets to become more familiar with Pika

Other discussion topics

• Discussion of potential changes to Discovery Committee with Adam Murray (Minute 45:00)
  • Adam is the product owner for Pika
  • Adam is working with Pascal, Chris, C.J., Ashley,  JB, and Brandon taking a very close look at how tickets, deliverables, or future requests flow through their current structure  
  • The group will detail out the ticket pathway to come up with a more structured approach for determining the time it will require to do the development work for a feature request or a noncritical bug.
  • Adam has given some thought to moving the release from monthly to being a quarterly process to take on larger projects without the release happening in the middle of the project.
  • Adam asked the group about their thoughts on moving from monthly to quarterly releases.
  • Pascal let the group know that there will be patch deployments with things that cannot wait for 3 months to be fixed.  There could be a monthly patch deployment for theming.
  • Pascal pointed out that quarterly releases will impact the timing for the Discovery Committee meetings.  The meetings will be every three months to coincide with the releases.
  • Adam suggested the idea of maintaining monthly Discovery Committee meetings with more targeted topics for each meeting.
  • Ashley suggested coming up with a monthly meeting schedule for different topics.
  • The quarterly meetings would be longer with demos and highlighting several month’s worth of work.
  • Adam received group feedback that he will internally take the concepts and add more details to them.  Adam will share the details with the group as a new evolution of how Marmot operates.
• Discussion of “Illegal Aliens” subject heading with Lloyd Chittenden (Minute 55:49)
  • ALA Subject Analysis Committee Report for context.
  • Libraries have discussed this topic for about four years.
  • The subject heading of “illegal aliens” is found to be a pejorative term.
  • The Library of Congress suggested changing it about 4 years ago, but Congress said not to change it.
  • Libraries are dealing with this term in their own systems.
  • The ALA Subject Analysis Committee Report found that Villanova, who created VuFind,  had the most interesting way of handling the subject headings.
  • Villanova programed VuFind so that if someone searches “illegal aliens” they would get the same number of subject heading hits if they searched “undocumented immigrants” or “illegal immigrants”.  When you go into the record the subject that is displayed is “undocumented immigrants”. 
  • The Union Catalog Committee looked at Villanova’s catalog and agreed it was an optimal solution.
  • Lloyd wanted to bring the issue to the Discovery Committee because this would mean a change in Pika.
  • Lloyd wanted to know if it was possible to make this kind of change in Pika, and if the group wanted to ask the Pika team to work on this change?
  • Pascal pointed out that the technical issue would be what the group wanted to show up in the facets. If you want “illegal aliens” to still show up in the facet, the simple translation will not be easy. 
  • Lloyd mentioned that Marmot members would like the term “undocumented immigrants” to display at all locations.  He was not sure if other libraries would want this change. The “illegal aliens” would still function as a successful search term.
  • Pascal pointed out that this could work for an entire consortium.  It would not work if libraries within that consortium wanted to pick and choose what is displayed in the facet.
  • Ashley will create a feature ticket and prioritize it. 
  • Action Item: Ashley offered to make a Google form for voting on this change.
• Training offerings for Marmot and Discovery Partners during social distancing (Minute 70:46)
  • Pika specific training is free to all
  • Other training offerings (Sierra/Google Analytics) have a fee for Discovery Partners

Next Meeting is Tuesday, May 5, 2020