News in Brief – February 2021 – IGeLU Primo Working Group
2021 Annual Enhancements Round
We are heading now into a busier time of year in terms of the yearly enhancements process for 2021, as we count down towards the final deadline for members to submit requests for the 2021 round on February 13th. Our Enhancements Coordinator of many years experience, Bettina Kaldenberg, is busy in her usual work of tidying up NERS of older submissions into Archived status. This gives a clean slate for a fresh batch of New requests to be updated by our Enhancements Team to Votable, as part of the next stage of reviewing requests. We will certainly appreciate the assistance of the community in the reviewing stage, with prompt responses to our queries if any of our Enhancement Team contacts you to discuss your submission. For the overall 2021 timeline, in collaborative discussions with our ELUNA Primo WG colleagues we aligned our Primo key dates with the already announced Alma key dates. This can be a surprisingly difficult decision of staggering dates versus alignment. There are benefits of alignment in only needing to remember a few dates and a targeted period of assessment and voting. And there are benefits of staggering dates, giving time to focus on each product, which can be quite important when there are many requests. We’ve had feedback from community members preferencing one or the other over the years, so we hope that this alignment decision is a good one! The full 2021 dates are available here.
2020 Enhancements Round Updates
For progress of our successful requests in the Primo 2020 enhancements process, there are a few updates:
- Create spinner or indicator for GetIt frame to indicate content is loading #6440 – This is delivered in the February 2021 Release for Primo via Back Office (n/a for Primo VE as no mashup and loading diamonds already in place)
We are also anticipating at least two more Primo enhancement in Q2 2021, as announced by Ex Libris Product Management in the “What’s New with Primo – January 2021” webinar.
- Fix indexing of words with hyphens (e.g. hand-book, etc.) #4457
- Add 505$t to Primo VE TOC and Title indexes #6552 (n/a for Primo via Back Office, as this is the choice of the site to configure if they wish)
You can keep track of progress via our Primo enhancements log here.
Primo MARC Advisory Group Report
We are pleased also in this update to share the work of several members of our active community, as members of the Primo MARC Advisory Group. This group was formed originally by a Recommendation of the Primo VE Summit (report available here), to define fields appropriate for Ex Libris to add as out-of-the-box settings for MARC tags, indicators, and subfield codes. This recommendation recognised the often uniformly common needs across our community for the same fields in our Primo discovery layers, saving all sites from individual manual configuration work, and benefiting the overall user experience.
We recognise with appreciation the work of the Group’s Co-Chairs: Amin Hussain and Richard Guajardo, as well as the contributions of all Group members: Kelley McGrath, Nathalie Schulz, Daniela Kroon, Mary Anne Dyer, Elliot Williams, James Clark, Shaun Akhtar, Suzanne Sager, Galen Jones, Liz Bodian, Raymond Deiser, Jake Schaub, Alan Dawson, Corinna Baksik, Jörgen Moorlag, Harriet Wintermute, Katie Finch, Fran Abbs, Lucy Cammell, Pete Wilson, Karen Obermeyer, Christopher Thomas, Stacie Traill, Catherine Busselen, Marcia Barrett, Marc d’Avernas, Richard Robertson, Tim Haillay, and Rachel Hollis.
The report was reviewed by both the ELUNA and IGeLU Primo Working Groups, with our member feedback incorporated into the final report, and has been submitted to Ex Libris Product Management, for our continuing collaboration and consultation through both our Primo WGs of resulting product developments. The final report is available here.
Data Visualisation on OAS for Primo via Back Office
In less positive news, we have not had a successful outcome in advocating for our Primo via Back Office community in the area of lack of support for the Data Visualisation (DV) module for Primo Analytics on the Oracle Analytics Server (OAS). Ex Libris has advised that this is only being made available to Primo VE customers. After steady and persistent raising of this notable disparity via all available channels for several months, including through the IGeLU Steering Committee to Ex Libris Senior Management, Ex Libris is adamant in their response and position.
Angularjs
To update on another advocacy item of key interest to the community, being the coming angularjs end of support in 2021 – the Primo WG continues to wait as eagerly as the rest of our community for the advised report to be provided by Ex Libris Product Management. This issue was raised by the IGeLU / ELUNA Primo WGs to the Steering Committees and to Ex Libris Product Management in October 2020, with need for information on directions and timelines, and our subsequent Primo WG interest in planning activities to support the community through any adjustments. We anticipate this report being available hopefully soon, as advised recently again by Ex Libris Product Management to our Primo community listserv.
Community participation in the Go VE Survey
And finally a note of thanks for our 100+ Primo via Back Office community members who filled out the recent Go VE Survey. The survey was open from 4th December 2020, and closed 29th January 2021, as extended by Ex Libris Product Management in response to community request via our Primo WG. We were more than willing to assist in this Ex Libris initiative by promoting the survey to the community listserv and in our last December 2020 News in Brief. We appreciate all who took the time to fill out the survey, as a key opportunity to directly share your thoughts, plans, and issues with Ex Libris, so that they can be addressed proactively. We look forward to seeing the results of this survey and in continuing to work together collaboratively with Ex Libris Product Management to support all our member community on both Primo VE and Primo via Back Office.
Stacey van Groll – Coordinator, IGeLU Primo Working Group