Kuali Ole

Announcing Kuali OLE 0.8

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:40:00 -0400

Kuali OLE 0.8 is now available—meeting our target date of 3rd quarter 2013! This latest release is the first available for the partner libraries to download the software and test-load their own data locally. The release is also available for academic research libraries (and others) to test-drive at: http://demo.ole.kuali.org/portal.jsp

Kuali OLE 0.8 adds the following features/functions, building on the infrastructure provided in previous releases.

The Deliver module incorporates basic circulation features/functions: defining policies; importing and creating patron records; performing checkout and checkin; placing and managing requests (recalls, holds, paging, and copying); and generating and delivering notices and bills.
The Describe and Manage module offers enhanced searching features, the ability to create/modify/delete records (bibliographic, holdings, and items), to transfer holdings and item records, bound-with functionality, and MARC record ingest. Also included in this release is the new Describe Workbench portal designed to provide improved workflow process support for cataloging staff.
One of the notable developments for Select and Acquire module for 0.8 is the development of workflow support for the license negotiation process (the License Request). See the OLE Guide to Licensing listed in the Driver’s Manual Other developments worth noting are the integration of order information into the “OLE instance” record which houses holdings and item information, the improvements in receiving items specifically multi-part orders and an enhanced import process of EDI files. Major additions to Acquisition functionality will be coming soon in the 1.0 release.

Details are available in the OLE 0.8 User Documentation: https://wiki.kuali.org/display/OLE/OLE+0.8+Milestone+User+Documentation

The Kuali OLE Project Team is currently focusing its efforts on extending OLE functionality for two upcoming releases. Release 1.0 (target date Q4 2013) will be the early adopters release and is currently in development. Specifications are being written for release 1.5 (target date Q1 2014).

Kuali OLE is the result of collaboration of higher education research libraries including Indiana University, Duke University, Lehigh University, North Carolina State University, University of Chicago, University of Florida, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania and Villanova University. Kuali OLE has also received generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb) – Building a Community-Managed Knowledgebase, An NFAIS Webinar

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:23:32 -0400

The Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb) – Building a Community-Managed Knowledgebase, An NFAIS Webinar:

Date: Friday, May 31, 2013

Featured Experts: Kristin Antelman, Associate Director for the Digital Library, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, and Liam Earney, Project Director, Knowledgebase Plus, JISC Collections.

Transitions

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 09:53:22 -0400

It seems to be “that time of year.” When March comes in like a lion we begin to look for signs of spring: crocuses, tulips and daffodils are starting to show themselves and tree are beginning to hint that they survived the winter. There’s a stirring in our surroundings as we begin to feel the changing weather and the buzzing excitement in people.

OLE is in a transition as well. Like a classic Minnesota winter, the KFS 5 merge seemed to last and last. It is finally surrendering as the last portions of code is integrated into OLE. Developers and consultants alike have been busy working on the merge since 5.0.1 for several months. The development staff remain busy preparing for the 0.8 release. The QA team and testers are ramping up to see that everything works the way it should. Just as winter sometimes throws in a few flurries because it is not ready to give in to spring just yet, so too have bugs revealed themselves. New testers are being trained to help in the process. The Describe Team (Cataloging) was trained in late February and Select and Acquire had theirs the first week of March.

Some days it seems as though winter will never end but some days it feels as though spring is truly just around the corner. We received a new grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation in January. The Functional Council and the Technical Council met at the end of February in Philadelphia, PA to review and plan. While 0.8 development is being completed and tested, functional Kuali OLE community members have already begun specifications for 1.0. Electronic acquisitions have been working for some time on specifications for an electronic resource record that will support the lifecycle of an e-resource. They have also been working to determine how to capture GOKb elements in OLE. The rest of Select and Acquire continues making modifications to the financial module and will incorporate more of serials and licensing. Describe has continued to spec out record editors and plans to include global changes for the Holdings/Items. Deliver has some workability already in “My Account”, a patron self-service feature. System Integration has begun to look at the OLE user interface and is working out plans for global changes.

Transitions spark a vast array of emotions. They can be a little scary, exciting, productive, cantankerous, exhilarating, and/or difficult. There are ups and downs but there always seems to be sunshine after the rain. If you look at the 0.6 milestone release and compared it to today’s development environment, there have been great strides in the OLE interface. A few more changes are still to come for 0.8, and yet new and exciting things await 1.0.

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awards Kuali OLE $750,000! (and other news)

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 12:40:38 -0500

Check out our official press release! We’re grateful for the support to help us complete our third year of development and to assist with implementation for our early adopters, Lehigh University and the University of Chicago. We’ve also updated our timeline to reflect current progress and to provide more detail about specific modules. Finally, we’re engaging in some interesting partnership discussions with international libraries and with prospective commercial affiliates in areas of discovery, implementation support, and hosting. This is an exciting time for the OLE partners and our project teams!

—Molly Tamarkin, Chair, Kuali OLE Functional Council

NASIG webinar on Kuali OLE 2/22/2013

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 09:21:11 -0500

NASIG webinar on Kuali OLE 2/22/2013:

Webinar description from the NASIG blog:

The Kuali OLE project is writing a new open-source integrated library system, designed by librarians at the OLE partner institutions. As part of the design process, the OLE team is striving to answer questions about how librarians will manage serials and e-resources in the modern environment:

How should print serials be managed in a predominantly electronic world?
How can print and electronic serials workflows be integrated?
How can OLE centralize and improve ERM functionality currently spread across multiple systems?

While OLE is still in its development phase, with version 1.0 due later this year, enough choices have now been made to give a coherent answer to many of these questions. This session will focus on those answers, and describe the process that went into making the decisions.

OLE and the Wild West of Licensing

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 13:00:19 -0500

Libraries and licensing made the news in late December. Did you catch “Libraries and E-Lending: The ‘Wild West’ Of Digital Licensing?” from NPR’s All Things Considered? While the article is about public libraries and their struggles with e-lending, the author mentions one thing that seems to be universal: licensing seems to be a frontier environment, a wild west, where every publisher has its own set of rules.

The OLE Licensing Specification Team has taken this wild frontier of negotiating, recording, and linking licenses into consideration and are working with developers to manage workflows and organize documentation. One subject matter expert suggested that many libraries use at least three different types of software to try to manage licensing processes. Can you relate? While publishers may have their own set of rules and procedures, OLE is developing software that is both flexible and accommodating.

Still in the beginning stages, the specification team and developers have started with license requests and agreements. An agreement is the understanding between the library or institution and a publisher, provider, or donor regarding access to content. OLE will store agreements in its Document Store (DocStore - think library catalog plus more). A license request is an electronic document (an online transaction initiated in a Web-based form and routed electronically through a prescribed sequence of approvers) that will be used to track and route license negotiations, communications, and documents (pdfs, docs, etc) between libraries and vendors.

Using the Kuali Rules Management System (KRMS) for workflows and PeopleFlow (from Kuali Rice, read more about both KRMS and PeopleFlow here) for versatile routing, staff will eventually be able to track licensing work from beginning to end no matter how structured or customized the process may be. Locally configured statuses will be used to report and search on current stages and determine future steps. Finally, with the agility of OLE’s ad hoc routing, users will be able to clear any sudden hurdles in the workflow.

While licensing may be a wild west with a changing landscape in many libraries, OLE is preparing to be flexible enough for librarians to accommodate whatever may blow their way.

Libraries and E-Lending: The ‘Wild West’ of Digital Licensing? (2012, December 27). NPR’s All Things Considered. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/2012/12/27/167649198/libraries-and-e-lending-the-wild-west-of-digital-licensing

The Project Manager, QA Manager, and Systems Integration...

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 08:59:24 -0500

The Project Manager, QA Manager, and Systems Integration Development Manager meeting with developers working on the Describe Module in Hyderabad, India.

OLE Technical Council Kicks Off Strong

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 17:04:49 -0500

The OLE Technical Council, reestablishing after a hiatus, met for a face to face in Chicago on November 27th and 28th. Consisting of the OLE Project Manager, one of the OLE Development Managers and a technical lead from each partnering institution, the Technical Council is charged with providing guidance in support of development related to the OLE baseline software. Their direction may consist of taking inventory of technologies, services, and interfaces to be utilized by the OLE system and identifying where standards or interfaces do not exist or need to be developed. They may also recommend best practices for scheduling OLE releases, patch cycle management and product upgrades as well as offer overall technical support to the OLE community.

During the Kick Off in Chicago, the OLE Technical Council reviewed these charges and went straight to work. They began by looking at the near future of OLE and discussed the timelines and priorities of the 1.0 and 1.5 releases. Then the council continued with considerations for an OLE sustainability plan. The OLE Development Manager was onsite to present OLE’s architecture, to suggest what the installation process may look like, and to review configurations of roles and permissions, system parameters and workflows. Chicago and Lehigh, the first implementers of OLE, divulged their staffing structure, approach, and timeline to the Technical Council. Recognizing the importance of good documentation, plans were reviewed and best practices were considered. Finally Chicago led a discussion on discovery layer integration and universal unique identifiers (UUID) but more on those another day…

Guest post by Nora Roggeveen-Sams

Kuali OLE Seminar at SCONUL

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 09:02:18 -0500

Kuali OLE Seminar at SCONUL :

Blog posting about Robert McDonald’s SCONUL briefing on Kuali OLE

Notes from Educause session on Kuali OLE Community

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 15:09:30 -0500

Notes from Educause session on Kuali OLE Community

OLE presentations from Kuali Days 2012

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:10:11 -0400

OLE presentations from Kuali Days 2012:

The presentations from the Kuali OLE track at Kuali Days 2012 are now available at: https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0B8COwsjidXDCTG43Z1QxUlBfOTg/edit?pli=1&docId=0B3c4Hq1jOIVcbDhMUk1pX0NIcWc

Eagerly awaiting GOKb

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 15:25:10 -0400

Eagerly awaiting GOKb

Panel for the GOKb presentation: Kristin Antelman (North...

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 14:54:00 -0400

Panel for the GOKb presentation:

Kristin Antelman (North Carolina State)
Liam Earney (JISC Collections)
John Little (Duke)
Michael Winkler (University of Pennsylvania)

Lakshmi Duvoor of HTC Global speaks at “Leveraging...

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 12:33:21 -0400

Lakshmi Duvoor of HTC Global speaks at “Leveraging Commercial Affiliate in Kuali OLE Implementation”

"Mellon does not fund products to compete in the marketplace. They fund products to change the..."

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 11:24:27 -0400

““Mellon does not fund products to compete in the marketplace. They fund products to change the marketplace. The success of Kuali OLE is not about marketshare. It’s about building a community to sustain development.””

- Molly Tamarkin (Duke University)

This is exciting!

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:34:13 -0400

This is exciting!

Greetings from the general session at Kuali Days 2012 in Austin,...

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 11:13:00 -0400

Greetings from the general session at Kuali Days 2012 in Austin, TX with the 834 in attendance, the largest ever.

Kuali Days 2012

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 13:59:45 -0400

Going to Kuali Days 2012 in Austin? Here’s a list of Kuali OLE events:

October 15

11: 45 to 12:30 pm Demonstration of the Open Library Environment (OLE) Software to date
2:00 pm to 2:30 pm Institutional Uses of Kuali OLE Document Store (DocStore)
3:15 pm to 4:00 pm Kuali OLE Project Update
4:15 pm to 5:00 pm Kuali OLE Editor Framework

October 16

8:45 am to 9:30 am Serving people and libraries with KRMS
9:45 am to 10:30 am Migration plans to Kuali OLE: A tale of two universities
11:00 am to 11:45 am Leveraging Commercial Affiliate in Kuali OLE Implementation
1:15 pm to 2:00 pm Kuali OLE Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb)
3:30 pm to 4:15 pm Supporting Community and Open Source Software in Cultural Heritage Institutions

http://kuali.org/kd/2012/

Bib data is now more open -- what about knowledge base data?

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 11:57:06 -0400

Recent conversations have highlighted the problem of libraries having easy access to core, non-proprietary data in a form that is readily usable across a range of systems. With OCLC’s welcome move in the direction of more open WorldCat data, libraries will be able to do much more with bibliographic records, whether in the form of MARC records or linked data.

But what about knowledge base data? KB records for electronic resources are core to acquisition, management and discovery systems. Carl Grant notes that libraries are having trouble getting their data out of their knowledge bases. Even where this is permitted, it is often not easy. At its core, KB data represents factual descriptions of information products that publishers, vendors and libraries all seek to either sell or purchase.

This is where the Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb) can make a real contribution. GOKb is not a link resolver knowledge base; it is focused on global-level metadata about e-resources with the goal of supporting management of those e-resources across the resource lifecycle. GOKb does not aspire to replace current vendor-provided KB products. But it does aspire to make good data available to everybody, including existing KBs, and to provide an open and low-barrier way for libraries to access this data. Our goal is that GOKb data is permeates the KB ecosystem so that all library systems, whether ILS, ERM, KB or discovery, will have better quality data about electronic collections than they do today.

The GOKb project is still in the early development phase. We are working closely with the JISC KnowledgeBase Plus project to develop this authoritative data source and services for libraries. GOKb has a project page where you can follow its progress.

Rethinking the RFP

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:56:25 -0400

As Kuali OLE matures toward implementation, the Functional Council has begun to think about how we will reply to requests for proposals, the dreaded RFP with its myriad checkboxes and delightful administrivia. Does anyone like the RFP? Similar to a resume, it in itself is no guarantee of success yet somehow seems vital to the procurement (or hiring) process. Perhaps it’s time to rethink the RFP?

Fortunately, we are not the only ones considering change in this arena. The LMS Change blog has some nice posts on the topic specific to libraries, and there are many resources about this topic generally. My own thoughts, based on years of experience procuring technology both in and out of libraries, drift toward the Aristotelian view that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (or than the number of boxes checked). I suppose few would disagree with this, but perhaps it’s worthwhile to note the parts which comprise this whole:

software functionality (okay, these are the boxes… what does it do?)
software provider: how enjoyable is it to work with them? how responsive are they to your needs? how do their customers get a “seat at the table” to provide input and to shape software development?
software stack: how well do the component systems integrate with existing tools? if they don’t integrate well, does working on integration carry you forward in new directions or tie you to a legacy system? how open is the environment to external development?
breaking away: what’s your exit strategy? how hard would it be to migrate to another system or to maintain your current system yourself without external support?
dollars and sense: open source software isn’t free—we all get this. But how do you want to pay to play? Do you want to write a check and get a support line? Do you want to build skills locally? Do you want a little of both?
your idea here [what am I missing?]

Even if your procurement process requires the RFP, it may be time to consider how those checkboxes could be altered to capture more about what might be the nature of the relationship with the software provider in addition to particular features. There’s what’s immediately necessary and what’s important for the long haul. Try to get both.