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Announcements/Updates

• Product Council minutes, 2020-12-03
• Please have your institution fill out Marshall Breeding's Library Automation Perceptions Survey:  https://librarytechnology.org/perceptions/2020/invite/

• PC: the project will be loosing Cate Boerema and Emma Boettcher
• if people know of others who might be interested in taking over one of the now available tasks, please let PC know
• new governance model: changes are linked in PC minutes

• Product Council minutes, 2020-12-03

• Please have your institution fill out Marshall Breeding's Library Automation Perceptions Survey:  https://librarytechnology.org/perceptions/2020/invite/

• configurable "Order material type" field
• local fields
• reporting codes
• institutins needing more detail could add that
• fields could be added by the system admin
• different types of fields could be added
• would appear in select list
• limitations: fileds must appear within defined accordeon
• searching and filtering not possible currently
• creation happens in settings
• users can hide fileds and thereby archive them if needed
• question by Charlotte: why is searching not possible?
  • Dennis: it can be done but has not been implemented
  • the terms are stored in the database
  • has not been in the scope of the initial implementation
• would this satisfy the need to have a unique material type in the order record
• question in chat by Julie: Would the custom fields reside on the POL or the header or both?
• Dennis: both is possible
• question by Martina S.: could you have multiple custom fields on one record and could you have the custom fields in receiving app as well?
• Dennis: yes, it seems users can have as many custom fields as needed
• Julie in chat: And please add custom fields to Funds on the finance app too :)
• comment by Scott Stangroom in chat:
  UMass would use for example, Material Type in the Orders (at the POL level) if there were no other way to pull reports of lists of orders by material type.
• concerns are: adding custom fields prevents order records to become more complicated for every institution
• Virginia: why not move all fields to custom fields that are not needed by every institution; there is already a lot of information in the order record that is not needed by everyone
• answer: because you cannot search for custom fields
• institutions would get needed fields much quicker than when they were hardcoded into the apps
• Kristin says and SIG agrees: custom fields will be useful; you need to know about the limitations
• Owen in chat: Agreed completely Kristin - the two questions are separate
• from a technical perspective there does not seem to be much difference
• being able to search on custom fields is key
• Sara in chat: And reporting, besides searching and/or filtering
• Scott Stangroom: Is it too technically difficult to add (or not add) custom fields to the index for filtering / searching / retrieval.
• Sara: And we should also not forget Lloyd's comment above about export, mapping etc
• Kristin: Do we have custom fields in Inventory Instance records, etc.?
  • Charlotte: no
  • UXPROD-2211 Custom Fields in Inventory
• Owen: We have Supplementary Information in Agreements which are tenant definable which is similar although the implementation is different
• Owen: migration from custom fields to single fields is harder than the other way round
• Owen: we had that in Supplementary Properties in Agreements - Leipzig use it for a reporting requirement And we had quite a lot of discussion about whether that was the appropriate way to do it before pressing forward with it
• Virginia: position of the fields will be important
• position fields in more important locations
• Owen: I think having a feature to implement custom fields for Orders, POLs, Receiving would allow us to see how these rank
• Owen: If it ends up being done before any particular individual field then institutions will almost certainly make their own decisions about whether they use it to do material types etc.
• current rankings speak for desire to have custom fields
• more rankings would be good

• enhancements needed for custom fields to meet requirements:
  • ability to search and filter
  • export from system with records
  • position fields in more important locations
• path forward:
  • create a feature for adding custom fields to orders; start with feature in relation to POLs
  • start assessing the community's desire
  • capture use cases in the specific feature

Features that need RM SIG Review

Question by Sara: Could we get Acq Units added to POLs, for example? To be able to search and filter that way when in POL

Dennis: there is an acq unit assignment on the POL; users just cannot filter for it on POL level

Owen: Where it gets really hard is when you go to searching across two apps of course - and that goes as much for Agreements & Licenses as it does across Agreements & Orders or any other combo