Please note: This presentation highlights our current thinking on this feature. Please help us improve it — share your questions, constructive feedback and ideas in the comments below.
We have been refining the locations model for FOLIO and I wanted to share the latest thinking. I’ll be presenting this deck to the Metadata Management SIG on February 22nd. Please join us then and/or weigh in here with questions or comments.
From an RA perspective, I think we’d want to reverse logic points 1 and 2. meaning that specificity of a rule should carry more weight than priority of criteria. The priority is a rather ‘weak sister’ and criteria type will not consistently be the deciding factor for any institution. I can readily imagine multiple situations where setting one criteria as a higher priority will cause more problems than it will resolve. e.g. - location is a higher criteria priority in most cases but not always when faculty are involved.
This is what the RA SIG agreed to and it should be discussed with us before it’s changed. Of course this was designed to include specificity of location and we still don’t understand how that’s supposed to work in the non-hierarchical ‘parking’ situation. The design also initially included some undefined ability to ‘flag’ a loan rule to make it more important when all else failed. I’m not sure if that’s still in play.
Honestly (and I know that I’m beating a dead horse here), a cascade based on line numbers will be the easiest thing to implement and manage. The tiered logic is over-taking the plumbing. Heck, if we went with a straight cascade we wouldn’t need the extra test interface since we’d be able to tell at a glance what gets priority.
In assigning a location can you use/see both the code and the display name?
A couple questions:
Will parking locations have a unique location code as well? It’s important that materials vendors are able to exchange location information with FOLIO in orders and cataloging records, so that we can set appropriate locations in those cataloging records and derive things like spine label prefixes/suffixes.
Is there a decision on whether electronic materials will have locations? Some current systems have the concept of locations for electronic systems (using codes like www, or web, or online), and some don’t. In my experience, some libraries like having these and like being able to use different locations to be able to distinguish different categories of online resources.
In assigning a location can you use/see both the code and the display name?
Yes, @andrealoigman we thought we would support auto-complete on name and/or code and that the selected location would be displayed with both the name and code (something like “Location Name (Code)”). Would that work?
Will parking locations have a unique location code as well? It’s important that materials vendors are able to exchange location information with FOLIO in orders and cataloging records, so that we can set appropriate locations in those cataloging records and derive things like spine label prefixes/suffixes.
A code is assigned to the entire location, including parking properties. So, if you’ve created a location for:
There would be a unique code for this location (e.g. “O/M/FR/GOV/MF”). Will that work for your use cases, @Ann-Marie?
Is there a decision on whether electronic materials will have locations? Some current systems have the concept of locations for electronic systems (using codes like www, or web, or online), and some don’t. In my experience, some libraries like having these and like being able to use different locations to be able to distinguish different categories of online resources.
I don’t know if a decision has been made on this. Tagging @Charlotte_Whitt in case she has more information.
Thanks for the replies, Cate:
Yes, so long as we can have unique codes all the way down to each parking location, then all should be fine for moving location info between vendors and libraries.
And will await more word on locations for electronic resources.
A-M
The Consortia SIG reviewed recordings of RA SIG’s discussions about the location model (1/29 and 2/1 meetings) and reviewed the slide deck at our meeting today (2/21).
Awhile back, we had put together a few unique scenarios that occur within our consortia (though they’re not necessarily consortial situations). These would be worth considering in the application of the hierarchy.
Several other questions/thoughts came up during our meeting today:
These may not have ready answers but wanted to make sure we put them out there for consideration as functionality around this model is developed.
To make things even more fun, there are consortia composed of consortia. For instance, the MOBIUS system (Missouri higher education libraries, mostly) is composed of multiple sub-consortia (SWAN, LANCE, ARCH, MERLIN, etc.), which are the level at which the the system tenants currently operate, which makes the permissions system less than ideal (folks from one institution can—accidentally, sometimes—edit and delete the data of another institution in the sub-consortia), but does provide a shared catalog for discovery and resource sharing purposes. To keep this model, the consortia location level would need to support multiple levels of nesting (both Institutions and other Consortia as constituents of Consortia locations). Apologies if none of this makes sense.
Going more in-depth on the joint facilities question: When Texas A&M U deposits an item in the JLF (shared storage) it becomes available for claiming by other member institutions. Say that Prairie View A&M uses FOLIO. PVAM sees that TAMU has placed Book A in the JLF and decides PVAM doesn’t need its copy of Book A any longer, withdraws it and claims the copy in the JLF (which is what the JLF was set up to do). There’s one physical copy owned by two institutions and each can count it as an owned copy when reporting to ARL or whatever.
Will FOLIO allow this? One copy claimed by two institutions. And then with reporting - when running single institution reports there will probably be no problem (PVAM owns x volumes, TAMU owns y volumes) but what about reports run across institutions. Will the jointly-owned volume get counted twice?
@Ann-Marie, I just wanted to follow up on the question of locations for electronic resources. As you know, when I presented to the MM SIG, there was general consensus that requiring a location for electronic items in inventory would be a good thing. This would enable you to filter by location to find your electronic items. The question becomes, what location would you want to assign? Some institutions use “www” in their systems today.
Thanks for all the great consortia use cases, @David_Dahl, @btravis and @PaulaSullenger. I can comment on some of these and I am tagging @vbar here, as he may be able to add some insight as well.
Collections seem like they could be an important element in loan rules, though perhaps “Collection” could be a Parking element. It seems like identifying that something is part of the “Stacks” collection would be more important in determining loan rules than elements like “floor” or “shelf row”. Collections seem like they could also have utility in the discovery layer for faceting purposes.
Absolutely. We expect some collections (specifically those that reside in a single physical location) to be modeled as “parking” while others (e.g. those that are conceptually rather than physically associated) should make use of the collection property. Both location and collection will factor into loan rules. Sorry about the floor and shelf examples - I’ve updated the slides to use “department” and “section” which I am told are more realistic. The key thing to remember is that the parking attributes can be whatever you want.
How does the Institution level map to a tenant? Can a single FOLIO tenant have multiple Institution values or is it implied that there is only one value at the Institution level? (This might have implications for the various ways in which consortia might be represented in FOLIO.)
Often a tenant will map to a single institution, but there can also be multiple institutions within a given tenant. This kind of setup may make sense for some consortia.
Related to the previous bullet, another model that was mentioned at the RA SIG meeting was to express the consortium at the Institution level with each member as a campus within the institution. All of these seem like they have implications for permissions, reporting, etc. It would be good to work out which of these models are expected/supported in FOLIO.
Yes, this would be another model supported by the location hierarchy. Indeed, it would be good to break down the pros and cons of each model for consortia setup.
When we say consortia live outside the hierarchy, are there ideas about what defines the consortia?
This is yet another way one could set up a consortia. I don’t believe we’ve gotten very far with defining the specifics.
To make things even more fun, there are consortia composed of consortia.
We need to think this through further, but a combination of the above models may work well for this.
Hi @cateboerema: with regards to locations for electronic resources, I’ve seen various options requested by libraries when we supply cataloging records to them.
Some will use something generic like www or internet or online for all of their eContent
Others will use a location that helps to clarify which users within the university (or consortium) have access to those online resources. Thus, there might be different locations for eContent accessible to the whole university vs eContent only accessible to the Medical School, or eContent accessible to all campuses vs eContent only available to a particular campus. Locations like these might be mainonline vs medonline vs allcampusonline vs branchAonline
Finally, I’ve seen some libraries use different location codes to differentiate different platforms, so perhaps a different location code for eContent housed on an EBSCO platform vs a Springer platform vs a Wiley platform vs a ProQuest platform vs a local eContent server. Location codes in these cases could be something like ebscoe or wileye or pqonline or springeronline
I can dig out actual examples from some of our customer setups if needed. Just let me know.
Hope that helps,
A-M