2022-09-12 Reporting SIG Meeting notes

Date

Attendees

 Present?

Name

Organization

Present?

Name

Organization


Arthur AguileraUniversity of Colorado, Boulder
Eric LuhrsLehigh University
xSharon BeltaineCornell UniversityxLinda MillerCornell University

Erin BlockUniversity of Colorado, Boulder
Nassib NassarIndex Data

Nancy BolducCornell UniversityxElena O'MalleyEmerson

Shannon BurkeTexas A&MxTod OlsonUniversity of Chicago

Suzette CanedaStanford UniversityxJean PajerekCornell University

Lloyd ChittendenMarmotxMichael PatrickThe University of Alabama
xTim DannayMount Holyoke College
Eric PenningtonTexas A&M
xAxel DoerrerUniversity MainzxScott PerryUniversity of Chicago


Shelley DoljackStanford UniversityxNatalya PikulikCornell University

Stefan DombekLeipzig UniversityxVandana ShahCornell University

Jennifer EustisU. Massachusetts Amherst / Five College
Linnea ShiehStanford University
       xLisa F.Texas A&M
Clare SpitzerStanford University

Alissa HafeleStanford University
Amelia SuttonU. Massachusetts

Jeanette KalchikStanford University
Simona TabacaruTexas A&M

Kevin KishimotoStanford University
Huey-Ning Tan

Stanford University

xIngolf Kusshbz
Vitus TangStanford University

Joanne LearyCornell University
Irina TrapidoStanford University
xEliana LimaFenway Library Organization
Kevin WalkerThe University of Alabama

Alexander LaoStanford UniversityxAngela ZossDuke University

Discussion Items

Item

Who

Notes

Attendance & NotesAngela

Attendance & Notes

  • Today's attendance-taker: Linda (or substitute)
  • Today's note-takers:  Team Leads for project updates

Announcements /
Reminders

Angela

Thanks so much to our WOLFcon panelists!

  • Thanks to Alissa, Ingolf, Christie, and Jason for participating in (or moderating) the Reporting SIG panel on Friday of WOLFcon
  • WOLFcon registrants should be able to use the conference Zoom password to view the recording (starts at 03:17:10); it will eventually be posted more widely I believe
  • Any impressions from people who attended?
    • so nice to see people in person!
    • most interesting things came out when discussing with other people there
    • talking to implementers of LDP, reporting is really needed for daily work; there are things missing in the FOLIO apps, important to be able to access the data more freely
    • Metadb with near-real-time data will really increase the people using our tools
    • a lot of workflows need the reporting
    • in technical sessions, some common themes came up that might be interesting to reporting (especially Arch Blueprint session) - how do we make deployment better, how do we get minimal platform
    • talking about the topic of hosting costs; for everyone who is hosting in the cloud, the postgresql costs are the highest, by quite a bit - db activity is central, but maybe FOLIO could be using the db technology better; maybe the way we use JSON is bringing extra costs with IO and CPU
    • costs could influence how hosting providers want to provide reporting support
    • if we see movements to try to make the database more efficient, we could try to figure out how to support that
    • Angela recommends Foliage recording (audio starts around minute 8) - note: requires WOLFcon Zoom password, only given out to people who registered. Hope there will be public recordings shared soon.
    • from reporting session, Ingolf spoke about FOLIO data privacy, worked with Nassib on slides; LDP, made choice not to store personal data, but in Metadb people might choose to store personal data, which makes GDPR compliance more complicated (have to be able to both export a person's data and delete) - slides up on Sched


How to find our latest recordings


(Always) Recruiting New Query Developers

  • The Reporting SIG is always on the look-out for new query developers. Please let us know if you are interested in doing query development or if there are others at your institution who might be a good fit.



New approach to report queries: cookbook styleAll
  • Report queries: hearing from implementing institutions that the actual report queries are not useful for implementing institutions. Everyone's setup is slightly different, and they just end up having to customize too much.
  • New approach: convert report queries to a cookbook style. Combination of narrative description and code examples. Guiding people on what tables should be used, how they should be be joined, any unusual data characteristics, etc.
  • Development teams will likely start by converting old report queries to this new style.
  • Discussion:
    • Cornell has an institutional repository where it publicly shares queries; would love to be able to collect institutional repositories so people would also have examples of running queries
    • Chicago also moving in that direction - should be creating a public repo in UC libraries organization on GitHub
    • Writing recipes might be a lower barrier than writing queries
    • This might be more inclusive than queries for people who aren't all on the same reporting system
    • at WOLFcon, technical debt discussion - efforts toward collecting technical pain points, so we could encourage people to put in tickets for specific documentation issues with the APIs when people run into them
    • going beyond just the brief description in the API documentation - what the fields really mean, how they connect, how they get created
    • Nassib submitted a ticket with specifics on what API documentation should include
    • also need a directory of derived tables
    • David Crossley has been doing something similar with the automatic generation of the API documentation, includes cross references between API endpoint and module that serves it up; if we have something consistent, could we generate an index/directory automatically? probably some existing tools for that (Sphinx?)
Finishing the Reporting SIG vision: mission statementAll

"The Reporting SIG will examine the reporting needs of institutions, offer advice on the design of FOLIO data models and reporting solutions, contribute time to the development of sample queries, provide documentation and training on topics related to FOLIO reporting, and offer a space for subject matter experts and technical experts to engage in discussion and collaboration."

Thought on asynchronous community engagementAll
  • in sociocracy, use rounds: ask each person to speak on an issue, going one by one (aka roundtable discussions)
  • could even go around twice, letting people build on previous rounds
  • is Slack working?
  • we set up a bunch of channels early on, might be working for subgroups, not sure it's working for the SIG as a whole
  • like Slack, but there are too many channels
  • feel like I'm constantly chasing Slack posts, shouldn't be using Slack for persistent documentation topics, but can be hard to know if a question is going to be a simple question or is going to yield an answer that should be kept around for a long time
  • FOLIO discussion board (Discus) comes up, but we don't use it
  • think FOLIO has a Slack account that retains messages, so maybe things can be retrieved, but there's still too much
  • maybe limit reporting channels to just one
  • maybe wiki and comments as another option? some dev teams do that
  • SIG probably needs to be watching Slack for FAQs that might need to be transferred to GitHub or Discus or something
  • Support SIG seems to have an automatic way of certain Discuss topics showing up in Slack.
Updates and Query Demonstrations from Various Reporting Related Groups and EffortsCommunity & Coordination, Reporting Subgroup Leads

Project updates

Reporting development is using small subgroups to address priorities and complete work on report queries.  Each week, these groups will share reports/queries with the Reporting SIG.  Reporting development team leads are encouraged to enter a summary of their work group activities below.

RA/UM Working Group


MM Working Group

  • Meetings are 1st Tuesday of the month, 12-1pm ET via zoom using the usual FOLIO password. Our lab sessions are open to everyone. Please bring your questions, examples, and comments about reporting and metadata.
  • We are still looking for reviewers and testers for ldpmarc. Please contact MM reports working group.
  • ldpmarc: Cornell noticed an issue with ldpmarc. Nassib is aware of this and coming up with a fix which will be tested.


ERM Working Group

  • Group transformation / Documentation
    • Group transformation: In addition to the specific developments, meetings will have become more of a lab session, working through specific problems.
    • We started creating a tutorial like RA/UM together with RM wg.
  • ERM Prototype and Query Development Status
    • folio-analytics version 1.5:
      • add comments to columns in all derived tables
      • Fixes
    • New directory structure for report queries in folio-analytics (metadb) with PR#666
  • eUsage
    • Goal: a derived table.
    • The development requires time and expertise from SME.
      • We're going to take it in phases:
        1. Get test data and enter it into our test environment. started
        2. Analyze data structure.
        3. Invite SME and have data explained.
        4. Creation of derived tables
  • Topics for the future
    • Open Access
  • Meetings are bi-weekly on tuesdays 11am ET alternating with RM Working Group
    • Next meeting will be at 13th, Sept
    • Contact Stefan Dombek if you would like to get a calendar invitation


RM Working Group


Reporting SIG Documentation Subgroup

  • Lotus documentation is live on https://docs.folio.org/docs/
  • Morning Glory documentation is complete and submitted
  • Nolana documentation will be in progress soon
  • Additional Context
    • The Reporting SIG has representation on the Documentation Working Group, which is building end-user documentation for https://docs.folio.org/docs/ (mostly linking to existing documentation over on GitHub)


External Statistics Working Group

  • no updates currently
  • new organizational/tracking scheme for JIRA, with pointers to queries in folio-analytics repository
  • New organizational structure for External Statistics reports
    • external statistics reports (e.g., ACRL) typically require running queries from different functional reporting areas
    • these reports will be captured in JIRA under one UXPROD-XXXX report cluster issue, then the descriptions will point to each of the queries required to run them on the folio-analytics repository
    • institutions will need to rank each of these 8 new UXPROD-XXXX report cluster issues
    • each reporting development team will take responsibility for the queries in their area for the external statistics clusters


Product Council



For all recent work on FOLIO Reporting SQL development:


Topics for Future MeetingsAll
  • How to deal with External Stats reports?
    • maybe subteam leads check in about that
    • probably wait until after Metadb conversion is more complete
  • ask for presenters: hosting experiences from implementers
  • Annual Reporting Goals
    • (in progress) Support the transition from LDP to Metadb (e.g., update derived table and report queries, update documentation, outreach, new training)
    • (ready to start) Developing training/onboarding for new SIG members/report users (esp. FOLIO-specific data model and transformation stuff)
    • (in progress) Develop a FOLIO Reporting Vision and Strategy
      • secondary goal: come up with language that can be used to explain to our institutions the importance of the work and of devoting resources
    • Improve communication between SIG and developers of apps so we hear about data model changes in advance
    • continued advocacy on part of the SIG to governance groups
    • (ready to start) Review JIRA issues, clean up, revisit strategy for JIRA
  • Additional data model training
  • Regular review of Milestones
  • Exploring new recruitment/onboarding strategies (e.g., buddy system)
  • Guest presentations: Foliage (Mike Hucka and Laurel Narizny from CalTech)
  • Demo latest version of LDP app, any new features?


Review and update Topics for Future Reporting SIG Meetings 





  • A test Action Item (Ingolf)