2025-09-04 Metadata Management Meeting notes

Announcements

There are no announcements.

Brainstorm and collect topic ideas for our working meeting session at WOLFcon 2025

@Felix Hemme and the SIG

Felix mentioned that during WOLFcon 2025 there will be one 50 minutes MM SIG working session. Felix asked the group who will be present in person and plans to attend the MM SIG session. He also asked whether someone attending in person can check the room and start up the session. Laura mentioned that ideally someone attends in person, but if that is not possible, they have some volunteers to help on-site. We would need to reach out to Jesse or Jennifer regarding volunteers. Vivian, Katie, and Natascha will be attending on-site, and Felix will reach out to them after meeting with the planning committee.

Q: How will the link for the meeting be shared with us? A: It will be shared in the agenda, and it will be listed under the session in sched.

Laura mentioned that she has a scheduling conflict for the MM SIG session at WOLFcon, so we should not pick a topic that relies on her running the meeting.

Felix: Because we have just 50 minutes, we should choose only one topic.

Potential topics:

• Implementers Topics review (Laura)

• Inventory Data Model review (Laura)

Charlotte: During the PC meeting, Christie Thomas and Jennifer Eustis presented on the top 5 priorities for the Data Import SIG. Christie mentioned that the original intention with Data Import was not that you would always have an underlying MARC record. However, the way FOLIO currently works is that if you import records, you will always have an underlying MARC record associated with your instance record. This fits into a discussion about the Inventory Data Model.

Laura: This also fits into linked data issues. Currently, if you create an instance with an underlying MARC record, then you are stuck with the MARC record. At Cornell, they have discussed numerous use cases in which you would create an instance from a MARC record, but would not keep the underlying MARC source.

• Hierarchical View of Inventory (Lynne) UXPROD-491

Charlotte: We should take the opportunity to have a face-to-face meeting during WOLFcon to discuss topics on our priority list. I agree that the hierarchical display is important because we only get the instance record. We should work on this ticket to make it more dev ready.

• Inventory UI

Felix: If a large number of members are attending in person, it would be beneficial to discuss the hierarchical display, but if most members are online, we should focus on what we would really like to achieve.

Laura: Q: Felix, are you proposing a broader review of the user interface for an inventory outline - what is working, what is not working, and what we would like to see? A: Yes, at least as the results list is concerned. We would not focus on searching and filtering.

Charlotte: In past discussions, some members prefer the multi-column list display, and others prefer the more visual presentation as Philip Jacobson suggested. For now, we can discuss which data elements we would like to have presented. Maybe, the content is, right now, more interesting to discuss, and then we can leave the more visual presentation for a later talk.

Sara: There needs to be a better way to browse holdings and item records. This is especially an issue for staff who deal with serials and periodicals because there are holding records with thousands of items. The instance record is too dominant. Maybe, the reason the hierarchical view has been around for a while and has not gone anywhere is that, in part, it doesn’t actually give us what we really need and want. The functionality for browse view (e.g., subject searching, call number searching) is a roundabout way to get at what we actually need and want. Therefore, we should think about what is it that we really need.

Felix: Yes, this should be explored in light of what other apps are doing, such as the Agreements app. With the Agreements app, the view is just focused on the entity you are searching for.

The MM SIG agreed on the topic of the UI in Inventory for WOLFcon meeting. Felix and Raegan will contact product owners regarding joining including Ryan, Christine, and Khalilah. (Khalilah may have a scheduling conflict). Felix will create a dedicated agenda page for the working meeting.

UXPROD-3473: Inventory: Strip leading, trailing, and double spaces out of data in some elements (instance, holdings, item)DraftPreview

@Felix Hemme

Because of a Slack message he saw last week, Felix has been in touch with Martina and Julian regarding how we can move this ticket forward. The current status is draft, and it is not complete. We should change it, so POs are more open to pick up the work.

We need to update the ticket description to reflect the changes the MM SIG has agreed on: Remove leading and trailing whitespace and ignore double spaces inside field values for the time being.

Felix proposed to split the ticket to provide a minimal viable product.

1 new MVP feature:

• Modify ui-inventory so that whitespace is removed when new records are created and existing records are changed = 1 story for each record type (instance, holdings, item) in Inventory.

• The UI will remove white spaces from the CQL query, so no mod-search ticket needed.

1 new feature that handles the correction in existing Inventory records:

• Correct faulty data in existing records manually by searching for them in the database, or individually by script, or community-wide using a migration script during Flower upgrade.

1 new backend feature for long-term solution:

• Modify mod-inventory to validate and

  • a) reject a JSON that contains any whitespace at the beginning/end or

  • b) remove leading/trailing whitespace from JSON. (Until developers change the backend, if you have any processes that rely on the API, they would still accept whitespaces at the beginning and end).

• Modify mod-search to remove whitespace in queries.

Comments

Sara: This is also in the Cross-App priority list.

Felix: Regarding the Cross-App case UXPROD-4546, this is a more general ticket for all apps across FOLIO, not just focused on the Inventory app. Also, the MM SIG agreed there are some use cases for double spaces. Therefore, we all agreed on leading and trailing spaces.

Concerns

Vivian: There are probably going to be places where more than one space is appropriate in the data or intended in the data. As long as there is some way to search for data strings that do contain extra spaces, then I don’t have any issues with anything that strips those extra spaces. CQL queries are already taking out extra spaces and that is concerning. Because we are not only stripping extra spaces for our default searches, we are also not providing away to search for data with these spaces.

Possible Solutions for searching for elements with whitepaces

Vivian: One solution is to make all default searching strip out the spaces, but we allow the CQL search to continue to define a search where we can define multiple spaces and not have those automatically reduced to a single space.

Charlotte: For cases in which we want to search for items with whitespaces, maybe, there can be advanced search option.

Laura: This reminds me of our discussion about searching MARC and the need for more robust reporting. Not all libraries have access to a reporting tool such as Metadb.

Felix: We should note that there should be a way for librarians to find these records if they do not have access to a reporting tool, such as Metadb.

Sara: Are we going to discuss which elements? In certain fields, you might want to have two spaces. A: We could not come up with use cases that we want to save the leading and trailing spaces, so we thought it would be easier to say anything. It is only the whitespaces at the beginning and end of the element. It is not about line breaks.

Felix will create a wiki page for the MM SIG where we can collect requirements and provide some examples. After the page is complete, he will share it via Slack.

Product Council updates

Charlotte Whitt

Link to Agenda: https://folio-org.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PC/pages/1173749808/2025-09-4+Product+Council+Agenda+and+Minutes

Discussed Data Import and ERM SIG Priorities. Trillium might be delayed.

BELA (Bulk Edit and Lists App)

Jennifer Eustis

No meeting this week.

Data Import SIG

Jennifer Eustis

No meeting this week.