2022-08-23 Acquisitions Meeting notes

:0

Housekeeping 

Dung-Lan

• Reminder - 8/26 (Friday) & 8/30 (Tuesday) meetings cancelled (preparation & traveling for WOLFCon 2022)

• WOLFCon Acquisitions session will take place, Sept. 1 (Thursday) from 9:30 am - 11 am Eastern Time.  Zoom link will be shared when available

:04

Screenshots & Feedback - Sorting Columns

Dennis 

• UX Adjustment for Sorting Columns

• Unclear which columns can be sorted and which cannot

• Idea is to add a little icon with double arrows to indicate that a column can be sorted:

Open

• Column currently being sorted with have one arrow and point down or up based on descending or ascending order:

Open

• Currently on hover the mouse does change to a hand, but will add alt-text as well to clarify:

Open

• Not sure of which release.

• Consensus in chat that this looks good.

• Some technical limitations to sorting certain columns. Would be sorting by UUID for "Assigned to" for example. Source of truth is elsewhere.

• Sara: Maybe some sort of note that this information is not native to this app. "Linked data" or "non-native to this app." Could be helpful to know where you go to edit the data.

• Bill: Get where Sara is coming from. Being able to contextualize this would be good. Need to in general be careful about adding too much visual information to FOLIO. Already have to look at a lot to get work done. Going to have to ask staff to accept a lot about the way the system works. 

• Alternative mock-up:

Open

• From Julie Stauffer to Everyone 12:17 PM
  I don't think people need to know why they can't sort

• From Peter Sbrzesny to Everyone 12:19 PM
  I don't think this info ("sorting not possible for technical reasons") would be very helpful.

• Julie: Info bubble here seems like it would create confusion. Would prefer nothing there.

:22

Implementers Topic # 51: Create Contact person or interface on organizations

Dennis

• Acquisitions/Resource Management implementers - Topic # 51

• Goal is to make it easier to assign or unassign users in Organizations. 

• Would it be better to have add contact as a separate action?

• Virginia: Feels like an edit to the record. Doesn't feel like it should be something that should be a separate action.

• Established pattern for notes; they are added the same way. Would be sort of borrowing from that pattern. 

• Challenge with edit form is that it is a technical problem. This is how FOLIO handles forms. Either there isn't a way around it or it is extremely difficult and requiring a refactoring of FOLIO forms to change the way this works. 

• A long time ago was conversation about having a separate contacts app. 

  • Relatively common to have a person move from one organization to another.

  • Would save time to be able to reuse contact information. 

  • From Bill Verner to Everyone 12:33 PM
    Yes, except that their contact data likely would not stay constant

• From Virginia Martin to Everyone 12:34 PM
  I'm not a big fan of the Notes app, so I wouldn't want to model this after it

• Virginia: Prefer to store notes on the record itself when possible. Do not have a great need to reuse notes. 

  • From Sara Colglazier to Everyone 12:36 PM
    +1 to Virginia

• Maybe it would be possible to save the organization record and continue with contact creation.

  • From Virginia Martin to Everyone 12:38 PM
    save and continue would be helpful

  • From Dung-Lan Chen to Everyone 12:39 PM
    "save and continue" makes sense

  • From Bill Verner to Everyone 12:41 PM
    Yes, "save and continue", which is fairly common functionality, would be ideal.

• Virginia: Use organizations quite a bit and maintain vendor contact information actively. Editing this a lot. It works, but it is an awkward series of steps. Staff who use it regularly understand and get used to it, but maybe some small improvements like save and continue.

• ~:43 discussing reassigning contacts.

• Sara: Interface aspect. A lot of this has to do with not being able to find the interface without knowing the organization it is assigned to.

  • Cannot see everything that they are associated with.

  • To have these buried databases basically that can be only accessed through a different database of information is not good.

  • Really hard to know where something lives in FOLIO sometimes. 

• Contacts difficult for a number of reasons. Also, does not seem to be a huge priority for most people. 

• Anything like this with multiple records seems like it should have its own management area. Should it have its own application? Or maybe live in Settings? 

• Sara: Interfaces so important for Electronic Resource Management.

• Julie: Going back to contacts and organizations where you were talking about having the record managed somewhere. Do we have use cases for contacts separated from organizations? For me its not necessarily the contact that I am interested in, I'm interested in the organization. Are there other things they are meant to be used for in FOLIO? We would always go by the organization route to find the contacts not the other way.

  • Numerous +1s

  • From Robert Heaton to Everyone 12:51 PM
    I agree. It's more like a PO line in the org.

  • Possible e.g. use case was donor information. - There were other use cases that were at least similar enough.

  • Julie: A lot of times we are not trying to remember person A, we just need to know that they are the person we need to communicate with for the organization. 

  • From Bill Verner to Everyone 12:53 PM
    Right, we don't go looking for the organization that Joe Frankinson works for. We want to know who our rep for, say,  Amalivre is

• Will need to investigate what is possible and then discuss as a group.

• Could just be a field set on an organization record.

  • From Virginia Martin to Everyone 12:55 PM
    Honestly, I would prefer for that to be how contact info on Organizations works