Conifer Project Planning – the Sudbury Edition (2009-06-17)

1. Prioritization of open defects / enhancements / tasks
   1. What must absolutely be completed prior to September?
   2. Is everything listed on our ticket system that we actually want / need?
      • Agreed upon priorities:
      • Circulation (including notices, matrix, patron load)
      • Holds and recalls
      • Indexing and reindexing
      • Search hang
      • NOSM / Laurentian borrowing
      • NOSM items and users at the System level
      • Laurentian University moves to top level
   3. Support and development resources
      1. Equinox is currently inspecting our set up; support clock will start ticking once the inspection is complete and any required modifications are made.
      2. Do we have any development dollars to put towards enhancements, or are we looking at only our current resources or pursuing grant funding?
         • Two year time frame as a project to enable possible funding of further expansion
         • LURF and ARF as potential research grants
      3. Do we have enough support & development capabilities within our respective walls? If not, how do we grow those capabilities?
         • Consolidate and solidify the current abilities
         • Be opportunistic with greater Evergreen community enhancements
      4. Reserves
         1. Art will start installing SYRUP on the Conifer servers once the acquisitions workbooks are done: ACTION: Cathy to say NO MORE CHANGES
         2. Workflow for moving an item from stacks to reserve desk – circ staff will need to modify shelving location / circ modifier / holdability
         3. RSS feeds for things like course reserve lists are probably there, just not exposed
         4. Goal: get live by Mid-July
         5. ACTION: add Graham Fawcett to Conifer tickets
      5. Support process
         1. Follow checklist; if circulation doesn't work, does the catalogue? Does Google work? Escalate to ITS – then escalate to local support person
         2. Report to Conifer discussion mailing list (although not everyone can do this)
         3. “We” (Art, Robin, Dan, Kevin) triage the problem and either resolve the problem ourselves, or escalate to Guelph or Equinox (or both) if necessary; post updates to the Conifer mailing list
            • Possibly take one week a month “on-call” duty?
            • Back-up catalogues would be good (start with comet / vufind / blacklight or kochief)
            • Dan to flesh out troubleshooting docs / enhance automatic monitoring scripts
2. OPAC skinning: tactical - short term collaborative approach within Conifer; strategic - OPAC rewrite (perhaps in partnership with King County?)
   • Windsor has lots of requirements for changes and enhancements
   • Lots of use of deprecated elements and non-optimal (X)HTML (although Dan suggested that IE6 compatibility is to blame for a lot of that)
   • Structure of the OPAC makes it apparent that it comes out of a public library background (although 1.6 will enable the addition of more record details)
   • Need a cross-Conifer group to discuss OPAC customization / rewrite work;
   • ACTION: Peter to initiate the group and pull together participants from across institutions charged with tracks:
     • tactical short-term changes
     • strategic directions (possible different architecture? VuFind/Blacklight?/SOPAC/Extensible Catalogue)
     • deeper architectural changes like Boolean OR or truncation operators
     • Discuss and agree and open tickets
3. Dispute resolution mechanism – finalize it
   • Escalate to University Librarians
   • Then presidents
   • Then escalate to a mutually agreed upon COU member
4. Cataloguing policies: setting our rules of engagement for the common bibliographic database
   • J.N. Desmarais catalogues in the language of the publication (English, French, or bilingual)
   • Hearst catalogues entirely en français
   • Huntington catalogues entirely in English
     • ACTION: Shu-zhen & Alain to form a cataloguing group to discuss cataloguing policies and open tickets where required
     • ACTION: Ron will forward Laurentian MARC templates to Alain
     • ACTION: Ron will create OSUL-specific statistical categories
5. OCLC and Amicus reporting
   • ACTION: implementation group to work towards a single method of reporting holdings
6. Reports and reporting in general
   • Peter: interface is a bit clumsy (field names); sharing is a bit unintuitive; need to leave filter values empty
   • ACTION: Add tickets for import / export of shared templates from Evergreen community
   • ACTION: Add tickets for four or five high-priority reports:
     • Shelf list (collection development)
     • Listing items with specific statuses
     • Overdues
     • Items by shelving location
     • List of items that have a status of “on hold”
     • Circulation time series (by hour, by day)
     • Patron past history
   • Potential development opporuntiy for generating templated output
   • Enable report sharing across consortium
   • ACTION: Check on Peter's permissions (should be local sys admin)
7. Conifer logo
   • Action: Art to send the logo out and us to applaud it
8. E-books
   • No dummy copies for Windsor should be necessary
   • ACTION: Art will open a ticket to replace “0/0” available with “Online” label
   • ACTION: Dan to add URLs for Algoma and Laurentian to various sets of records
9. Growing Conifer: a number of us have talked with colleges, public libraries, and special libraries interested in Conifer.
   1. When would we open the door to additional partners?
      • Summer 2010 for adding institutions at college levels
      • Require contribution of dedicated resources
      • Any migration would require early preparation (discussions in the fall and testing migrations in February / March)
   2. How would our current cost-sharing agreement be affected?
10. Promotion / PR:
    1. Equinox has asked for a quote for a press release
       1. Yes, this is okay
    2. Do we want to pursue any awards like the OCUL achievement award, ORION discovery award, or OLITA award?
11. Next meetings:
    1. Teleconference in mid-to-late July (Dan's last meeting for a few months)
    2. OCUL director's meeting in November (Windsor)
    3. OLA in February