[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Documentation questions for 1.6

[Soulliere, Robert]

Hi all,

I had a few question on some of the trickier chapters of the documentation.

1) Migrating data - importing bib records (mass import outside of the staff client):

It seems the most thorough information on the wiki is here:
http://www.open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=evergreen-admin:importing:bibrecords
We added most of this to the documentation here:
http://docs.evergreen-ils.org/1.6/draft/html/migratingdata.html
and  here:
http://docs.evergreen-ils.org/1.6/draft/html/migratingbibrecordcopies.html

It feels that this documentation is too general and doesn't give a good set of standard procedures to get the user safely from MARC records into Evergreen. I understand that exporting data from a system will differ depending on the old ILS system. However, it seems that standard procedures to get files in the the standard MARC format into the Evergreen database could be improved. Does anyone have a good set of specific instructions to do so or does the nature of migrating bib records and copies make it impossible to develop standard practices for this?

There are pointers to migration utilities provided on Conifer's contribution area and provided by Equinox which are linked to from the documentation. The Equinox utilities seem to be the newest. Are these the suggested tools for migrating bib records and copies? Other than install instructions, there doesn't seem to be much instruction for using those Equinox tools.


2) Acquisitions - A question was asked recently on the general list  about documentation for the acquisitions sneak peak module in 1.6 but we do not have anything in regards to documentation as far as I am aware. Is there anything out there? The release notes indicate:

"Acquisitions Preview includes a sneak peek at the preliminary work for manual funding management, PO creation, cataloging and receiving processes. These are functional but are not intended for insertion into current workflows. This feature was specifically included to solicit feedback from the community on this important feature."

It indicates that these are functional, but how functional are they? Has anyone given this feature a test drive or can anyone verify that this can be used in any way? I am wondering about how much documentation we can have for this or if we can give some work flow examples or if we should provide a warning that this is not really functional? Again these questions are specific to 1.6.


3) Circulation policies - A few weeks ago someone brought up the lack of circ policies documentation on the general list and made some important points about the lack of guidance for this in the documentation. I think this will be more easier to cover in version 2.0 since polices can be controlled more from the the staff client , but i wonder if we could provide some documentation for circulation policy practices in 1.6? We must keep  in mind that different types of systems will have different needs and different policies and practices? A single library system will have different needs than a consortium for example.

4) Release notes for 1.6.1.x - On the download page, the release notes link for Evergreen 1.6.1.2 indicated coming soon. Does anyone have updated release notes to share for the 1.6.1.x series?

Any feedback to these enquiries would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Robert








Robert Soulliere, BA (Hons), MLIS
Systems Librarian
Mohawk College Library
robert.soulliere at mohawkcollege.ca
Telephone: 905 575 1212 x3936
Fax: 905 575 2011

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