[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] brain dump on first doc/training session

[Jason Etheridge]

Hi folks,

I wanted to thank Andrea Neiman, Karen Collier, Karen Foster, Ron
McDaniel, and Randy Metcalfe for volunteering to be the first set of
guinea pigs with our "training the documenters" project.  Thanks!
Unfortunately, I was unable to find a good solution for recording the
session, and that's entirely my fault.  I still think it's a good idea
and will continue to look into it.

For my brain dump...

In my opinion, this first session turned into a demo and whirlwind
tour of Evergreen, which I think was good thing, and I couldn't resist
talking about planned features, etc.  It did bring up the question of
which version of Evergreen are we documenting, and for that, I'll
defer to Dan Scott, who has agreed to head the actual documenting part
of this effort, but for my part, I hope to teach the underlying
concepts for Evergreen which should transcend specific versions
(Evergreen literacy, so to speak), and I suspect for actual detailed
documentation (look here, click there, etc.) we will have to provide a
reference server (perhaps demo.gapines.org?) for everyone to work
against at their own pace.  Dan, is that what you had in mind, or does
it sound sane?

Some of the things we went over:

* The Organization Hierarchy as a tree-like structure and how various
fields, settings, and behavior can be defined for specific orgs in
that hierarchy and inherited by their child orgs  (we also went very
briefly into the boostrapping CGI scripts for configuring some of the
more static parts of Evergreen, like org units and org unit types)
* Statistical Categories as an example of such fields, that are
library defined and visible only for the libraries for which they're
defined
* The public catalog, a highlight of most of the functionality there,
such as bookbags, meta-records and meta-record holds.  Even showed a
little OpenSearch and unAPI, and bookbags as MODS, MARCXML, etc.
(which reminds me, I need to find the URL's for the recently
added/created feeds in Evergreen)
* Then we went into the staff client, and here my memory gets a little
fuzzy on order, but we
  - registered a patron and showed how it does searches in the
background for potential duplicate patrons,
  - talked about the different types of circulations: cataloged,
non-cataloged, vs pre-cataloged,
  - skimmed the Patron Bills interface and showed how you can
cherry-pick which bills to distribute payments to, and annotate all
staff-initiated billings and payments
  - talked about the permission system and how it prompts for
overrides on perm failure
  - We also skimmed over the various cataloging interfaces: the MARC
editor, record buckets (we showed how you might merge records within
buckets, which prompted a feature request for merging records outside
of buckets, as well as one that was already planned, the
cherry-picking of tags from the disparate records to go into a new
"composite" record), and Holdings Maintenance.
  - We looked very briefly at the Item Attribute Editor and the Label
Printing interface, and talked some about the flexibility of
circulation behavior.

I don't believe we talked about transits and how holds can be
configured to work, nor did we go very deeply into the local
administration menu (we created a few stat cats and some non-cataloged
circ labels).  We did not go into receipt templates, the reporting
system.  I think we also suffered some for not having good demo data
to work with (folks like PINES and British Columbia have the luxury of
training/testing with snapshots of real data or dry-run migrated
data).  That's something being worked on by various folks, and I'm
going to put a random patron generator up on the wiki soon.

Technology-wise, we ended up using Skype + WebEx, which seems to have
worked well, though some of the audibles or sound effects from the
staff client would obscure what was being said, so I'll mute those
next time (there's an option for doing so in the Local Admin menu).

Any brain dumps or thoughts from the rest of you?  I had a good time,
and hope everyone got something out of the first session.

Thanks again!

-- 
Jason Etheridge
 | VP, Community Support and Advocacy
 | Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts
 | phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS (673-6457)
 | email:  jason at esilibrary.com
 | web:  http://www.esilibrary.com