2023-01-11 Meeting notes: JIRA for workflows at Lehigh

Date

11 Jan 2023

Housekeeping

• Convener and notes: Martina Schildt
• Next meeting: 16 Jan 2023
• New and open Slack channel: #appinteraction_crossapp
  • all members are copied
  • old channel archived

Discussion items

1. Using JIRA for workflow processes at Lehigh | Maccabee Levine  Dan Huang

Minutes

• presentation: 
• way to interact with the entire library

• trying to do everythin in a very organised way

• ILL, website form, lost items, all in one tool and visible to everyone
• they developed a Purchase Request Platform - PRP App 
• developed it on free version of JIRA
• application needs to be able to accept input from librarians and patrons, e.g. Lehigh Purchase Request, with a browser plugin into JIRA
• https://lehigh-university-libraries.github.io/purchase-request/
• use of Kanban boards, possibility to move tasks from one column to another
• JIRA ticket enrichment to get pricing by title via API - eg. OASIS pricing information; there is interest from other vendors as well
• comment instead of using telephone; communicating with multiple people at once; positive result: faster responses
• "making sure the whole library works together"
• PRP App: useful for patron input as well as assisting collectors
• handling lost, damaged and missing items are pulled in autmatically and replaced
• communication on existing other copies and pricing for replacement is done via comments again
• integration with Reshare is nearly done
• workflow:
  • 5 statuses
    • New - if requests are here for too long, they will be automatically moved to approve
    • pending review - if you do not want to make a decision immediately; if selectors want ot wait whether enough money is left at the end of the year
    • approve
    • declined
    • on shelf

• FOLIO could build connectors into workflow managers
  • reshare and Jira are both already existing and could be used
• purchase requests are not yet existing in FOLIO - would be a good improvement in FOLIO but would have to be a FOLIO business object
• how does communication back to patron works
  • as soon as request gets to final status, patron receives an email automatically (or mail URL for electronic access)
• if requests comes in via email: librarian clicks on title in the email and does an amazon search
• training: no elaborate long-term training needed (depending on trainer, though)
• if Lehigh hadn't already used JIRA, they maybe would have gone for Trello, which seems slightly more user friendly 

Chat

Transcript

Future topics

• Topic proposal by Owen Stephens for October:
  • Use of shortcut keys and macros for more effective cross-app working  - it also be good to have UX and Stripes/dev knowledge for this discussion I think. I know @Laura (she/they) uses macros so might have insights into the potential for cross-app working
  • Potential for external 'workflow' solutions for cross-app interactions
    • I think 'workflow' is a dangerous term here - in this context it's more about automation than user workflows, although I think there is overlap
    • I was particularly struck by the solution in production at TAMU (Jeremy Huff and Sebastian Hammer presented, the recording is at https://prod-zoom-recordings-openlibraryfoundation-org.s3.amazonaws.com/50dc6c87-3912-43fa-8287-56ec73b12bbb%2Fshared_screen_with_speaker_view%28CC%29.mp4 starting at 3 hrs, 14 min) - I think getting someone from TAMU to talk about how this is used would be v interesting
    • There was also a presentation on the use of a tool called Airflow at Stanford for "bibliographic workflow" but I've not watched that yet so not 100% sure if it is completely applicable - I think the core use case there was systems migration but it may go beyond that
    • Or Jenn Colt on using Prefect
    • does not need to be workflow across apps
• UX/UI and implementers topics
  • should be Wednesdays
• comprehensive look at where data is copied and stored as opposed to live data | how it is represented

Attendees

Action items