2019-09-09 RPWG Meeting notes

ACRL Report Prototype

-Kevin has generated an ACRL Annual Survey Report Prototype

-4 main queries to run: volume count, title count, circulation, collection expenditures

-queries will need to vary by library, e.g., how does your library count items?

-choosing what you want to count may depend on the quality of catalog coding by area at your institution

-prototype includes all locations now, but can use effective location LDP attribute soon

-Kevin will add patron type and loan type attributes

-(Scott) Is cataloging status built in? Kevin will investigate.

-(Scott) The PO has flag for expenditure type. Kevin will investigate. (Payments will not be available until next release.)

-encumbrances include for your information, although most institutions don't report these figures in ACRL reports

-(Tod) Perhaps working on the prototypes collaboratively gives us an opportunity to have more uniform practices in reporting across libraries (as has been seen in other functional areas) 

-Kevin will also work on the queries associated with this report

-Scott shared the Recent Schema for Financial Transactions from Resource Management

DB Viewing Tools and Query Developement

-Angela demonstrated a tool she has been using a tool to connect to the LDP called DBeaver 6.1.5, and she is using the ldpqdev instance of the LDP

-Nassib has added a more financial data attributes

-Circ Item Detail and Services Usage are the main queries Angela is working on 

-Nassib and Angela finding it makes sense to think about query development style, and recommends query writers review the queries on github thoroughly before starting query development

-although we can copy and paste the query templates for our own use, we most likely will need to do further editing for our own institutions

-use the WITH statement to name a query at the beginning of your query; you are selecting a constant and giving it a name

-LDP software now supports both Amazon RedShift and Postgres, so queries are being developed to work on both

-recommended we review the Circ Item Detail query, then the Services Point usage queries 

-do not use SELECT * - you must explicitly name the fields you want

Test Data

-(Nassib) we will need query development as well as testing a static data set, so we have decided to take a recent copy of data from Folio Snapshot for the LDP, freeze it, then augment it with additional data as needed

Demonstration of how to contribute a new SQL report query--or a modification of an existing query--using the shared community space in GitHub that has been set up for this purpose.

Refer to Using GitHub to develop report queries for folio-analytics for written instructions.

Future Topics: