Evergreen Reports Interest Group Meeting - 2013 Evergreen International Conference

April 10, 2013 3-3:45 PM Pacific

Note taker: Amy Terlaga, Bibliomation

1. Introductions
2. What is RIG?
3. PINES Reports Working Group Presentation
4. The future of RIG
5. Possible Projects
6. Wish List Review

• 20+ partcipants
• Jessica asked who was comfortable with the reports interface and who wasn’t. About half the room indicated comfort and half the room indicated not so much.

• Jessica explained what the Reports Interest Group (RIG) was. Meetings are every two months in IRC. The group is trying to determine what kinds of reports are needed in the community.
• More information on group activities is available here.
• Jessica recommended that everyone get on the reports mailing list (mailing list and/or email reports@evergreen-ils.org for more information).
• IRC is where meetings are held. Jessica would like to see more people attend. More information on connecting to IRC is available here. If you don't have an IRC client, click on "Web Gateway" and enter a username to get started.

The PINES group then explained what it is they’re doing. Elaine Hardy explained that they are trying to develop a new interface that streamlines reports running. This is meant for staff who don’t have much training and will not replace the current reports interface. There will be canned reports – quick reports (essential reports for staff) and executive snapshot (for director – helpful for Board presentations). They created a survey that they distributed to their members and then the overall Evergreen community. They hope to cover other requests brought to them by the Evergreen community. Full survey results are on RIG website. Respondents could select multiple service areas – branch manager, business office staff, department head, director, front line staff, technical services staff. Directors primarily filled out the survey. 47 types of reporting needs were provided. They need to determine what will realistically fit in their budget. 41 types of reporting needs were provided in executive snapshot. Next steps – analyze results of both surveys. They need to develop project specifications. There will be a functional specifications section and a non-functional specifications (usability) section. There is no timeline yet for the project completion. Emerald Data is the vendor that PINES will be using to develop this reports interface. Any inquiries go to pines-reports-wg@list.georgialibraries.org.

• The group is looking for projects that facilitate the sharing of reports resources. The group has talked about possible solutions. Perhaps a website that people can post questions about creating reports.
• The group suggested that there should be a way to export reports. It was mentioned that Equinox had talked about a sharing server at the last conference and that report templates were discussed as one of the resources. You can export them as SQL, but an interface that allows exporting and importing would be much preferred. Something like the receipt templates. This will be added to the Wish List.
• Email was suggested as perhaps the better way to discuss report issues as email is always there and you can’t always make it to an IRC meeting.
• Is the reports list necessary? Is it intimidating to post to the reports list?
• Jessica suggested maybe reporting on report triumphs to share with the community. She will post to the general list, asking for them, compiling them, then sharing them.
• Elizabeth Thomsen will ask for training on reports stories.

• Jessica showed the group the current reports wish list.
• To be added:
• The template number is not on the templates, but on the reports folders.
• Searching the templates would be a nice enhancement.
• Adding a URL field to a template would be nice so a link to documentation could be included.
• Adding the ability to edit templates to clone would also be nice.
• Adding an SQL checker so that any dangerous reports could be tested before it is run.
• There should be the ability to add a note field to the template so that you can add a description for your users to understand what certain parameter settings mean.
• A format checker would be nice so that if a bad date is typed in, it would be caught.
• Should these be added to Launchpad?