Meeting Minutes for 05/05/2020

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

• Release Notes

Record Grouping improvements in project progress (Minute 28:20)

• Using one grouping testing server that does include Marmot records and all the discovery sites ILS content.
• Record Grouping Improvement progress documentation
  • Pascal pointed out a list of test sites under the Record Grouping Testing Servers section of the document.
  • Under the section labeled April is listed all the grouping work done for last month. 
  • Fall back fields will be used when the 008 field is invalid to get a good grouping language.
  • For Sierra systems, the language fixed field will be used when the 008 is not valid. For Marmot, the Sierra language fixed field is the 998 subfield f.
  • For a multiple bib grouped work, the 008 typos would not prevent a bib from grouping with other bibs into the single work.
  • The Marc tag 041 subfields will be used as a fall back as well.
  • The indexer will be set up to let the developers know when records have bad 008 codes.  At some point, the developers will be sending emails with those records to the catalogers to be fixed.  This will be important because the 008 will still be the primary language source for the record.
  • OverDrive has the two-letter language code that will be converted to the standard three-letter language code that is being used for grouping.
  • The next major thing is matching up the grouping category determination to the format determination in indexing.  Currently, there are four grouping categories that are related to the format, but in a very broad sense of the word format.  A grouping category translation map was created to include the values of each format  A sideload grouping category was specified with indexing profiles and format determination.
  • There is continued work on the grouping author’s normalization.
  • There is a Pika - Language Grouping document with information about how the grouping language is determined.  
  • It would be very beneficial if everyone looked at their test grouping servers for grouping problems.  Grouping problems like does this bib belong with this work.  The record grouping progress document has links to specific tickets to give people an idea of things to look into more detail. Feel free to put comments into those tickets with problems you have noticed. 
  • This is the time to look for issues because when this goes into production changes cannot be made.  Send an email to [email protected] or open a ticket if you find any issues.

Discussion of development priorities for the next release (Minute 41:36)

• Road Map
• The work shown during the meeting is going to be the last of the monthly releases.  Following the June release, the major releases will move to the quarterly release cycle.
• Marmot has taken the time to view their agile methodology to come up with some new methods for communication, and ongoing prioritizing feature requests that come from all members. This will make it transparent to everyone when different projects or development work are slated for release. Instead of turning to the committee once a year for a large feedback request on setting priorities, the feedback will happen on a much smaller scale on a more ongoing rolling basis.  This will allow the constant opportunity for members to help Marmot understand what is of most value to you and weigh that into the sequencing of projects that will tie into releases.  This new process stops the backlog from getting too large.

Current Release

• Implement RBDigital magazine APIs
  • Ready for implementation
• Stability Version - Record Grouping Improvements
  • ​Pascal will continue to work on the record grouping projects
• Admin user options project
  • C.J. will continue to work on these options

Other discussion topics

• Pika Cataloging Collective: still open to people interested in being involved (Minute 45:25)
  • Marmot would really like to invite your cataloging experts to join the collective.
  • Marmot would like a representative from all the Marmot Members as well as Discovery Partners.
  • Meets the third Wednesday of every month at 1 p.m.
  • Currently testing record grouping improvements.
  • Will move to a deeper discussion about MARC and search facets after record grouping improvements are completed.
• Suggested Pika improvement (Minute 47:43)
  • CCU asked to have the next and previous arrows at the bottom of a page and not just at the top.  These arrows display when doing a search and clicking on a title.
  • Ashley mentioned that anytime you have a Pika suggestion to please email [email protected].   

Next Meeting is Tuesday, June 2, 2020