2025-10-20 Cross App SIG Meeting notes

 Date

Oct 20, 2025

Attendees

• @Tara Barnett, @Heather McMillan , @Martin Scholz , @Laura E Daniels , @Former user (Deleted), @Owen Stephens, @Kristin Martin, @Kimberly Pamplin

Housekeeping

Recording: https://recordings.openlibraryfoundation.org/folio/app-interaction-group-mondays/2025-10-20T12:00/

 Discussion topics

Notes

• Heather announced that Suzanne Gill has agreed to step in as convener for the Acquisitions SIG in 2026 and will begin transitioning over the next couple of months.

• We discussed Owen’s slides outlining what Search Documentation embedded in FOLIO could look like.

  • We like this idea immensely.

    • This is convenient, and achieves the primary goal of making how search works more transparent to users.

    • This strategy places the responsibility on the app developers themselves to know how search functions in these key areas, and will eventually create a virtuous cycle that is very likely to result in more standardized searches.

  • Challenges:

    • It may be difficult to agree on what the standard list of search features should be. For example, should we include search features that are consistent between apps? (To my knowledge, no app includes stop words, for example.)

    • It may be challenging to achieve an appropriate degree of granularity. We note that if the text is really long, scrolling might become an issue.

    • We aren’t completely sure of the best way to handle different searches in the same app--how do we list exceptions? More columns increases the scrolling issue.

    • There are a lot of tiny little buttons in FOLIO, but we agree that this doesn’t really add to the overwhelm of the interface as a whole.

    • We note that going down this path means giving up the ability for the SIG to make direct changes--we will be reliant on the SIGs to prioritize getting this work in, and on the POs for implementing it.

  • Questions

    • Should this be in the FOLIO docs?

      • We noted that this information should likely also be in the FOLIO docs (similar to the way Keyboard Shortcuts are handled). However, the originator of the information should be FOLIO itself--the docs should reflect what appears in FOLIO.

    • Laura asks if it is possible that the modal itself could be moved to the side so that you could see it while you are working. This isn’t how any modal in FOLIO currently functions, but we agree would be cool.

    • Does this distract from the ultimate goal of having searches be consistent across FOLIO, since it allows us to merely document the inconsistencies away?

      • Not really--we can continue to pursue consistency, and this will be a valuable source of information.

• How to move this plan forward:

  • Actions:

    • Agree the list of behaviours we want to document

      • We note that we do not actually need to do the analysis in order to complete this step (we do not actually need to know how every search functions). We merely need to identify the behaviors.

    • Reach out to stripes team to see what would be involved in developing a component (assuming they agree a component is the right approach)

    • Present to POs for feedback

  • We discuss at what point this should be taken to the SIGs. We agree that in this case it is preferable to first take this idea to the POs. While SIG feedback will eventually be valuable, we have sufficient representation and discussion from WOLFcon to be confident in this direction.

 Action items