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

[Andrea Buntz Neiman]

Hi Jason,

Thanks :) You were awesome!  Like Ron, I didn't get the "shy" at all!  The
more I learn about Evergreen, the cooler I think it is.

Can't wait for this week's session.

--Andrea

-----Original Message-----
From: open-ils-documentation-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org
[mailto:open-ils-documentation-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org] On Behalf
Of Jason Etheridge
Sent: Friday, February 29, 2008 11:25 PM
To: Public Open-ILS documentation discussion
Subject: [OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] brain dump on first doc/training session

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 _______________________________________________
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