2021-10-19 Bulk Edit Working Group Meeting Notes

• Magda: Please add your SIG affiliations to the list of working group members column on the Bulk Edit Homepage list of working group members so I can reach out to subject area experts as needed.
• Magda: I represent you while talking to developers. But I also represent developers while speaking to you. I need to find a balance between what is needed and what can be implemented.
• Magda: We will be starting with a pilot project or proof of concept as some like to call it.
• Magda: I will reach out to you with a survey asking what your expectations are for this pilot project, and how you would determine that this project is a success.
• Magda: We will not cover bulk deletion. We will be working on bulk edits for user records only in this pilot program.
• Erin: Is there anyone from the User's SIG here?
• Magda: There are but they are not attending today's meeting. I will be sending the recording to them.
• Bob: Since we are focused on users when I provide feedback do you want us to keep it focused on user records. Or can I provide feedback on other kinds of records I work with?
• Magda: Yes, other kinds of records. That is the reason the group is cross SIG. I need you to bring to my attention when there are things specific to areas other than users.
• Magda: I want to concentrate on communication. Please let me know if you do not understand or I am not clear in my statement. We need to be on the same page.
• Magda: Play with the application once features are developed. Early feedback is the most valuable feedback because we have access to development resources. They can address the issues in a week or two. If we start getting feedback once the software is released, addressing the issues is delayed until the next release. Provide feedback as early as you can.
• Mark: Do we have a release date?
• Magda: Yes, the plan is to have a release with Lotus.
• Christy: Is there any expectation for when this is going to expand beyond users?
• Magda: The plan is to have some basic functionality available by January for the pilot project. We will review and adjust and then every release, every three or four months, we will move to the next functional area. This group will decide the order of development. Based on use cases so far, the next area to be developed will be items. I would like to start with the most simple and move toward the more complex and leave MARC to the end when I will understand your needs better and the development team will be more experienced and able to build more complicated things faster.

Housekeeping:

• Notetaker 

• Magda: Please feel free to post questions or comments about the pilot features. I will be adding additional features as our meetings progress for additional functionality.

• UXPROD-3225 (Bulk Edit - User data - Pilot)

• Magda: This is an umbrella feature meaning it has a couple of features associated with it. One is already in progress.
• Magda: The scope of this story we will support the searching user by user group, and identifying records by providing barcodes.
• Magda: And within the edit, we will support removing user permission, updating expiration date, updating patron group, updating email.
• Magda: If we go with the approach of downloading and uploading files, which is the most likely approach for the pilot, then you will be able to edit other fields as well.
• Magda: The pilot project will cover the following elements:
  • Identify records for editing
  • Edit record(s): add data, remove data, update data
  • Review changes
  • Confirm changes
  • Commit changes
  • Log committed changes
  • Handle exception (including notifying users)
• Magda: Once the pilot work is done we will need to review this. And the question is who will we review this with. Do we review with the product council, technical council, or will this group review it?
• Magda: Based on findings we will recommend implementation for other areas.
• Magda: The question I have is who will make the decision that the work that was completed is OK for further implementation. The answer to this will be part of another survey that I will send to you later this week.

• UXPROD-3228 (Preliminary work for Bulk Edit App)

• Magda: The first feature is already in progress. It is the preliminary work for project setups in GitHub, Jira, and adding specific UI components to the Bulk Edit page which is already available on snapshot. But it also contains several spikes, the areas that developers need to investigate the best possible approach for development. Based on this more technical stores or features we will be building in order to deliver the functionality.

• UXPROD-3229 (Identify user records for bulk edit)

• Magda: It will consist of two options, search using a list of user barcodes or other identifiers as time permits and searching by user group.
• Erin: Going back to the umbrella UXPROD. Even the limited Bulk Edit scope is a little bit too big. The permissions records are not part of the core user record which would introduce significant complexity. Are we at a stage where we can pull this back even further? What do you think?
• Magda: I am glad you brought this up. This is one of the questions I had on my list to ask. And this question also applies to permissions, fees, and fines. It also applies to all other records: inventory, all the reference data, instances, holdings, items, and relationships. We will be talking about this probably during the next meeting. But, yes it is possible the list will be narrowed down.
• Erin: I am in favor of that, but I do not remember what the context was from the UM discussion.

• Magda: This involves a lot of unknowns here because the final implementation of this will depend on the findings of the spikes that the team will be working on in this and the next sprint.
• Magda: In the scope of this feature are:
  • The user will be able to save the file with the records that match the search criteria
  • Make the changes locally and upload the modified file so that the changes are posted
  • The system will handle exceptions
  • The system will notify the user about the exceptions
• Magda: Out of scope of this feature are:
  • Bulk Edit updates to other than user records, e.g., inventory records, fees and fines, permissions (we will come back to this as mentioned above).
  • Bulk deletions are not in the scope of the pilot project.
• Magda: Questions are:
  • Handling permissions
  • Handling fees and fines
  • Handling loans
• Erin: No questions but just a comment. It is kind of related to permissions that I am very nervous about bulk editing anything that is involving finances, and anything involving business logic which is both fees and fines and loans because you don't want to edit the underlying record in such a way that it violated the overall business logic that would have managed it if it was one by one.
• Magda: I am also very concerned about data confidentiality, who can do what, who can see the data, and I am also very concerned about the impact of Bulk Edit because if we do not do it right we can introduce a lot of problems for the underlying data. So those are things that we need to be very cautious about. I would like to have the permissions as restrictive as possible. So limit access, especially in the beginning, to those that know what they are doing, and then as the application matures address those. This is definitely on our list of things to discuss.
• Thomas: Are you thinking that Bulk Edit will have its own permissions that will override other apps' permissions?
• Magda: This is something we will need to discuss. To be honest I did not even think of overriding other permissions. Do you have a use case for that?
• Thomas: I was mainly thinking in the realm of user's settings. I know that there are very finite permissions for editing users. If someone has permission in the Bulk Edit APP that allows them to edit user data, it might bypass the security settings that are already in place in the Users App. I'd prefer that the opposite happen, that Bulk Edit looks at the user's permissions and then does not allow them to change data that they do not have permission to do in the other app.
• Magda: This is a very good point, thank you.

• Development team Scrum board 

• Magda: The team that will be working on Bulk Edit is Firebird. They are located in Belarus and other parts of Europe. Besides Bulk Edit the team works on Data Export, OAPMH, circulation logs. So their plate is full. At this point, Bulk Edit, and data export of holdings are the highest priorities. But they will need to be supporting these other areas as well. As you can see there are already several Bulk Edit stories in progress or completed.

• Development status

•  Magda: If you go to the Bulk Edit test environment https://folio-testing.dev.folio.org/bulk-edit (diku_admin/admin) you will see the Bulk Edit App icon. We have the beginning of the functionality showing up, e.g., query and identifier search tabs, file upload button. This is font end work only. Nothing is happening on the back end yet.  So what you see is only visual effects for now.
• Sarah: Just to go back to what Thomas was saying. I understand user permissions and the difficulties. In FOLIO, I feel like every app is very user permission defined. And I can see it easily happening that I might be asked to do bulk editing for records, but that I do not have the specific permissions set up for me in some little area. That would be fine if we want to be careful, but then there has to be a  logical message that pops up and says you don't have permission for this and this. So that then I will know that in order to do these tasks I need to get additional permission. What often happens in FOLIO now is we get these toasts (user feedback message) and we have no idea what is going on. This is a problem. We need to foresee this as a problem that will happen, we will encounter this.
• In Chat: 00:52:24    Jackie Magagnosc:    Clarity in error message would be awesome.
• Sarah: Additionally, another thing Secondly, it's kind of related, we now have shelves and shelves of moldy books that we needed to have a company come and take away. So, I have been bulk editing ranges of call numbers (thousands of items) as moldy so they can be taken off-site. I also found out I need to check them out to a generic patron that I set up called conservation. I am doing this in bulk also because there are thousands. Our system has something that I can use, but I just figured from testing, that if an item in this range is already checked out my bulk edit thing will not then uncheck it out and check it out to the conservation patron. It gives me a wonderful report letting me know. But on the return, it does not take the designated patron barcode into account and it unchecks out all of them. It returned all of them. So just like we want to be aware of permissions, we also need to be aware of internal logic for these bulk things we are doing. That is often a danger and we don't realize it. And we either build it into how we describe what Bulk Edit will do and function but I don't think we should rely on outside documentation necessarily rather an informational "i" that can pop up and alter you about what the function is about to do or not do.
• In Chat: 00:52:43    Erin Nettifee:    we have lots of use cases for bulk *actions*, but not all of them are use cases for bulk *edit*
• In Chat: 00:55:07    Jackie Magagnosc:    Erin, could you explain what you think the difference between bulk "actions" and "edits" are?
• Erin: I agree with you, Sarah. And that is a great example of what I described in chat and Jackie has a follow-up question about I think we have use cases which are use cases about actions and we have use cases for bulk edit. And I think bulk action needs to use FOLIO's business logic. and that would be things like loans, and fees, and fines. We need to use the business login to make sure all the different fields are checked or unchecked. so that it makes sure it is working like it would in the UI. But then you have bulk edit which is I know that I am looking at this record, this field needs to change on this record for these thousand things. You know the location field needs to change, the vendor field needs to change, etc. I think this app really needs to focus on the edit piece because I think the bulk action piece is too complex.

•  In Chat: 00:56:12    Jackie Magagnosc:    Thanks! That is very helpful.

• Magda: I think this may ve partially resolved for us if we do the Bulk Edit using the existing endpoints for each application. Meaning, instead of, and we are not going to go directly to the database, we are going to use the existing endpoints. I do the post and put to the existing endpoints. I use the existing business logic, assuming the business logic was not implemented on the UI side. And if it was implemented on the UI this is where we need to be extremely careful and cognizant of what is happening.
• Erin: You are talking about an extreme expansion of the scope in my opinion, that I think it could derail the functionality of this app. The more we try to cover these hundreds of use cases in one bulk app, the more it is going to turn into what has happened to Data Import where the complexity has really made it stop in ways that have made it hard for groups to work through. The clearer you can make this one particular apps mission the better off we will be.
• Magda: These are both very good points. Thank you Sarah for bringing our use case. Erin, that you for being the voice of caution. I may be overly optimistic. So, thank you very much for the feedback.
• In Chat: 00:58:09    Thomas Trutt:    I agree as well.

• Survey results overview and wrapup

• Magda: Our next item is to review the feedback but I do not think we have time to do this today. I will post in chat and link to responses in Slack. But I have a very basic question. many of you in your comments refer to something as global updates. What do you mean by global updates?
• Bob: I'll take that. That refers to the terminology in Sierra. That is what we call bulk edit in Sierra.
• Leeda: It's the same in ALEPH. That feature is called, I believe, Global Changes instead of bulk.
• In Chat: 01:01:38    Sara Colglazier (MHC/5C):    Yes, for ALEPH Global Changes
• Magda: The other question is for you Robert. You posted a recording of the edits in Sierra. There is no sound. Is that because I don't know how to turn on the sound or you recorded without sound.
• Bob: I did not speak during the capture.
• Magda: It was easy to follow to some point but then I got lost a little bit. So, I will reach out to you with some follow-up questions for you if that is OK.
• Bob: Sure, yup.
• Magda: We are at the top of the hour. Thank you so much for your time and feedback we has a really good question I will send a couple of more surveys or at least one. See you all in two weeks.

Future discussion topic (time permitting):

• SMEs expectations from the Pilot Project
• Bulk Edit Permissions
• Max number of records to be edited via User Interface
• Scheduling edits