Project Conifer

A lot has been going on with Project Conifer since the last update:

John Fink

• Comet - will upgrade to latest stable OpenSRF and Evergreen
• Working on gaining official IP approval from McMaster's IP overseers for documentation contributions (dual-licensed under GPL and CC-BY-SA)

Dan Scott

• Installed latest development OpenSRF and Evergreen code on starburst (includes acquisitions beta) and notified Project Conifer
• Fixed several locale-handling issues in OpenSRF and Evergreen

Project Conifer has been a bit of a blur for the last few weeks, so my apologies for the lack of updates. We have been finalizing our hardware requirements, pursuing contracts for hosting, migration, and support, and going through local training sessions to get ready for a push towards going live on Evergreen on May 1, 2009. We have also been working out adjustments to projected expenses and the partnership due to the changing relationship with one of the founding partners of the project, McMaster University, which is going to continue contributing towards development and will migrate to Evergreen, but on their own time frame and on their own locally hosted servers.

The last week of January was particularly full of activity:

John Fink

• The project issue tracker is alive, and ready for the testing / feedback groups to start making use of it
• Will resume tackling loading holdings on Thursday and Friday of this week
• Will disappear from anything resembling work from December 18th through January 5th

Dan Scott

Project update for the week of December 5th, 2008:

John Fink

• Interviewed two candidates for the technical writing co-op position with Dan on Monday (despite illness)
• Offer has been made to the candidate for the technical writing co-op position for January - April 2009. Better yet, the offer was accepted and the candidate started asking questions to get up to speed in advance.

Art Rhyno

1. Introductions - play the "match the voice to the person" game.
2. Adoption of agenda
3. Review action items from last meeting:
   1. Dan to tally capital costs to date (servers, personnel, etc).

      Dan made an initial high-level tally available from the Project Expenses page and circulated it to the group well before the meeting. On the call, the group thought it was a good start but requested finer grained information.

John Fink

• Holdings import: successfully ran the import demo scripts last week but couldn't find any resulting holdings in the instance on comet. Dan offered a few SQL statements to help debug the problem ("SELECT COUNT (*) FROM biblio.record_entry;" / "SELECT * FROM biblio.record_entry WHERE id > 1 LIMIT 1;") and offered to help if John runs into any other roadblocks.

Art Rhyno

• Art has been forging ahead with Graham on the academic reserves support; likelihood is that the end product (at least for May) will be a loosely-coupled application with Conifer, so some customization of the My Account pages, etc, will have to be used to pull in info from a separate application and deal with authentication, etc; but given the limited runway for development time that's perfectly acceptable

Dan Scott

John Fink

• There may be a few more candidates for the tech writer co-op position after all; John is following up with Seneca.
• Just starting to install Evergreen 1.4 on comet, per 2008-10-29.
• No progress on loading holdings yet.

Dan Scott

• Dan sent a flurry of messages to the list earlier in the week chasing down action items from the last project planning meeting.

John Fink

• No progress on installing Evergreen 1.4 on comet
• No progress on loading holdings
• Bad news: it looks like the four applicants for our tech writer co-op position have already found employment. So we might not have a tech writer co-op student after all.

Dan Scott

• Participated on Algoma's search committee for an e-services librarian on Tuesday / Wednesday. Ken wants this person to be able to join the project and go full steam ahead on Conifer development, hopefully early in the new year.