Meeting Minutes for 09/06/2022

Demo of new features, bug fixes, and documentation for the upcoming release (Minute 19:52)

• Release Notes

Discussion of development priorities for the next release (Minute 48:37)

Road Map 

• Will be thinking through Q1 & Q2 for 2023. As well as a little bit of Q3 for 2023.
• A few of the Q3 2022 items will be rolling over to Q4 2022 such as the reindex reorganization effort. The reindexing that happens nightly consumes a  ton of resources and memory. Marmot is always looking for ways to streamline that process as much as possible.
• The search documentation updates will be rolling over from Q3 to Q4 2022. As well as some search functionality in the Q4 release.
• Q4 Pika Docker development has been ongoing for a little while in an effort to continue to streamline the way the server room environment is set up for Pika specifically. Chris has mentioned his Ubuntu server this play into the Docker development. Marmot is working with a consultant on structuring an AWS Kubernetes environment. Chris’ work on the Ubuntu server can be populated into that environment.  
• We have had a good number of questions about when Marmot will update the Digital Archives. The Digitial Archives are built on Islandora which is an open-source platform for digital archive materials. Islandora is based very heavily on Drupal.  Drupal has changed its end of life for different versions. Drupal 8 reached the end of life before Drupal 7. Islandora is currently built using Drupal 7 but has plans to move to Drupal 9. There is a new version of Islandora that encompasses the move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 and next to Drupal 9. The Islandora community calls this move Islandora 2.0. This is a pretty significant reworking of the Islandora code base. What Pascal will be spending some time doing in Q4 is putting together a plan for that implementation. This implementation might be scheduled for Q2 of 2023.  
  
  • Pascal added that the main complication is in addition to the Drupal changes, Islandora has also changed how the metadata works. Figuring out how to map our existing metadata to whatever the new technology is the top priority for Pascal to figure out.  
• C.J. finished putting together the punch list of the accessibility issues related to Pika. Pika came out looking pretty good compared to the standards that will have already been put into our operational plan. Marmot is going to be shooting toward AA compliance on as many of the WCAG 2.1 standards as possible.  C.J. will be working with a team to start chunking out the development that is required to bring all those different items into that level of compliance. This is not likely to be fully implemented in one release. You might hear about it over the next several releases throughout 2023 and perhaps 2024. Marmot is mindful of the deadline set forward by the statute for July 1, 2024, and strives to meet that deadline.                     

Other discussion topics 

• Enhancement Prioritization survey review and questions (Minute 00:20)
  • Detail user stories
  • Only one response per Marmot library/discovery partner, please!
• Accessibility Project updates (Minute 01:59)
  • C.J. has finished the punch list of possible things that need to be changed or updated to meet the new accessibility standards.
  • C.J. will start to create tickets and update templates. As well as contacting libraries whose colors may not have enough contrast to stay within standards.
  • The state of Colorado has put into law a change in accessibility standards for websites. This change is affecting Pika in varying degrees but should be beneficial to our Colorado members and members in other states.     
• Marmot Help Desk demo and sunsetting YouTrack for outside users (Minute 3:34)
  • Moving forward, the Help Desk should be the place to submit questions, problems, outages, and requests for new sideloads. The new Help Desk has a lot more features like a tie-in with our Knowledge Base to display links to documentation that might help answer your question.  
  • Communication will now be in those shared threads in the Marmot Help Desk system instead of email.
  • The Development team is going to be sunsetting YouTrack for access. YouTrack is a valuable tool for the Development team because it has workflow mapping and a good deal of historical information that is still useful. Ashley will likely reference YouTrack tickets in some of their internal documentation or enhancement surveys. However, people will not be able to access the information in the YouTrack tickets in the enhancement surveys the ticket links will be more for internal tracking.
  • Until the YouTrack boards are privatized, please do not submit tickets or cards to the Inbox in YouTrack. 
  • The Marmot Help Desk service requests and help us populate the Knowledge Base from the frequently asked questions or issues.  
• Updates on server migration (Minute 15:08)
  • The Development team has been working on a new server for Pika. Marmot is currently on centOS but their packages are not necessarily maintained which has forced the team in the past to use different package managers that have resulted in difficulties. 
  • These difficulties come about during last year’s bugs that came out in Apache. At the same time, there were some Java bugs that come out that were concerning and specific to Apache.
  •  The Development team has been working on building out an Ubuntu server for Pika that is near completion. Flatirons will be moving to that system but the timeline has not been decided.    
  • After Flatirons is moved, the team will decide if they are going to move the rest of the Pika sites over to Ubuntu instances or Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Docker. 
  • For now, the team is focused on getting the Ubuntu server stable.
• Flatirons Consortium joining Marmot Consortium (Minute 16:34) 
  • Flatirons Library Consortium is another fellow consortium in Colorado. They have been a Discover Partner with Marmot for several years. Since there was a small consortium they have hosted their ILS server (Sierra) with Marmot. In the past, the Marmot staff have helped with the administration of Sierra tasks when their admin person was out sick or on vacation. Their admin person took another job earlier this year and that sparked a conversation between Marmot and Flatirons about a closer partnership. 
  • The Flatirons Board decided to dissolve the Flatirons consortium and become six individual voting members of Marmot. 
  • Marmot is proud to be continuing to work with the Flatirons libraries. These libraries will also have individual voting toward Pika development. 
  • The six libraries are Boulder, Broomfield, Lafayette, Longmont,  Louisville, and Loveland.
  • Marmot is excited about this partnership that is ultimately going to benefit all Marmot libraries because we will be adding a second ILS administrator position to the User Services team. This new position will be able to help Brandon Cole and Marmot overall to continue to provide strong support to Marmot’s Sierra systems.
  • We will start to see new representatives from those libraries starting joining the Discovery Committee group.

  The next meeting is Tuesday, December 06, 2022