2024-05-15 Meeting notes: Inventory - Agreements interactions

5 min

Announcements

@Martina Schildt

• Material type discussion was planned for May 29, 2024

  • can we postpone until Jun 3, 2024 or later, as Ryan cannot join on May 29th?

  • Material type: optional or required

• 2024 Meeting and topic calendar

• Next meeting on May 20th: @Martina Schildt away

5 min

BELA upate

@Amanda Ros

• Wolfcon: Several libraries will present on their experiences using Bulk Edit and/or Lists.

• There was discussion about bulk editing MARC fields and whether to overwrite protected fields. The group agreed that protected fields should be honored unless there is an explicit indication to overwrite them.

• Question: Would AI be interested in a UAT session for providing feedback on BELA releases?

55 min

Inventory and Agreements interactions

@Charlotte Whitt

@Sara Colglazier

All

• mockups by Charlotte | use cases by Sara

Link to slidedeck:

03:22

Housekeeping

• Material Type Discussion

  • We will move our discussion of whether or not material type should stay mandatory in Inventory to June 3rd. Ryan Taylor is not available for our original proposed date. In general this works for members of the SIG--Martina will check with Kristen Martin that June 3rd works.

  • Martina has created a wiki page to collect arguments on this subject: Material type: optional or required Please add use cases as discussions continue in SIGs.

• Review of Upcoming Meetings

  • Martina will be out May 20th. Laura will convene. We will be discussing custom fields in Inventory.

06:45

BELA Updates

• Libraries will be presenting on their experiences using Bulk Edit and the Lists app at WOLFcon. They will be presenting from different FOLIO releases.

• BELA discussed whether or not protected MARC fields should be honored in bulk edit. The BELA group decided that protected fields will be honored unless there is an explicit indication to overwrite them.

• Amanda asks whether or not the cross app SIG would be interested in participating in a User Acceptance Testing (UAT) session for BELA.

  • Martina asks what form this would take. Amanda says that we could use an App Interaction meeting to go over this with Amanda and Magda. We would go through steps in the app with the goal of eliciting feedback and questions.

  • Hearing someone's thought process out loud can be valuable when doing this in a group setting. Charlotte and Laura agree that this is valuable.

  • Martina says we will schedule a call at a time that Magda can join.

  • Sara asks if Reserves will participate in the testing? At many institutions, Reserves relies heavily on Bulk Edit. Reserves falls under Resource Access. Martina will ask Jana if she is interested, and if so, Jana will get in touch with Amanda.

12:24

Inventory and Agreements Interactions: The Proposal

• Sara introduces the issue. We had previously met about having URL links between agreements/agreement lines and inventory holdings records.

  • On the Agreements side, Owen had planned to investigate the possibility of having a URL field in the agreement line to facilitate this (and other) links.

  • On the inventory side, Charlotte worked with Sara on mock ups of how we could have a new accordion in the holdings record for this purpose. Today we will view the slide deck to show the proposed holdings record changes in Inventory. (See UXPROD-4785: Link to Licenses/Agreements/Agreement lines from Inventory, holdingsDraft )

• The use case: technical staff users receive vendor data files with records for ebooks, streaming videos, etc for purchased Packages/Collections. These records are not linked in acquisitions processes/orders. Users need to indicate why the records are in inventory. A link to the license or agreement from the holdings record meets this requirement.

  • This link must be at the holdings level rather than the instance level because in cases where multiple institutions share a tenant, multiple institutions share a bib record but have independent agreements.

  • Another reason to link at the holdings level is that one institution may have different agreements for different platforms (and thus different holdings), but the same instance record for the title.

• (17:55) The proposal is to create a new accordion called ERM Information. In the accordion, there would be a field called "URL Relationship" that would store links, including the URI, a description/category describing what the link is, and a note field. Edit mode would be similar to the electronic access area. Multiple links on the same record will be supported.

• Filtering (22:02): there will be an additional filter on the side which would allow the user to filter by the type of URL. Query search on URL would also be available.

• Ideally, this field would be available in bulk edit (25:12), would be possible to load via Data Import, and would be available to query in the lists app.

27:00

Inventory and Agreements Interactions: Discussion

• URL vs UUID

  • Owen asks why this is done with a URL rather than a UUID. Should we use the "add" functionality similar to other apps?

    • The typical way to create inter-app links in FOLIO is to store a UUID and have FOLIO generate the URL and present it to a user, rather than store a URL provided by the user. If we do not store the UUID and choose to store the URL, no further functionality can be built on this field--it will remain purely administrative. Storing a URL precludes the possibility of ever displaying information from Agreements based on this field, for example.

  • Sara notes that we need to be able to import/export a URL in a user-friendly format (ie as a URL) as well as view the URL in the UI. Owen confirms that this is possible to build in FOLIO.

    • URLs can be generated by FOLIO even if what is stored is a UUID. The “mouseover” URLs seen throughout FOLIO are being generated by FOLIO--they are not stored as URLs.

    • It is theoretically possible to parse an imported URL through data import

    • It is theoretically possible to generate a full URL through data export, even if what is stored is a UUID.

    • All of these would need to be built.

  • Sara notes that UUID is not searchable in ERM.

  • (52:55) The main issue is that if you accept any URL in this field, you can't act on it because it's not reliable or controlled. In this case, further functionality may not be required, but if future functionality in FOLIO is desired then we need to consider this up front.

    • (57:26) Sara notes that FOLIO's choice to prioritize data control over flexibility led to issues like Chicago's problems in orders caused by Material Type being required, and ISBN checks in Orders making Invoices unpayable.

• (32:55) Questions about labeling

  • It's unclear if we mean to store any URL or only URLs for agreement lines, agreements, and licenses. The labels/headings chosen should reflect this. We agree that this will need to be taken to the community for feedback--as long as the general shape is good, we need not wordsmith it now.

1:00

Conclusion

• Martina asks how we should continue this discussion?

  • Charlotte says that we are not ready to bring this to the broader community, but could take it to MM-SIG. Customizable data elements in Inventory may be able to fill the needs listed above.

• We decide to spend our session next week comparing this functionality to Inventory Custom Fields. On Monday May 20th, Laura will give an overview of custom fields in our meeting.