At RERO, we’re witnessing an acceleration of space-time, especially in the RERO ILS project, and in this haste, we “forgot” to inform you that two new releases have been published!
Below, a summary of the added features of these releases is proposed, but the detailed notes can be accessed through the following links:
Release v0.6.0
Version v0.6.0 (and its sibling v0.6.1, which is only a patch as indicated
by its version number)
separates the public interface from the professional interface. The public
interface, accessible to all with or without authentication, includes the
shared catalogue and the organisations' catalogues, as well as patron accounts
and the action that is available to them, such as requesting an item. The
professional interface gives access to all action undertaken by library staff,
as for instance searching in the catalogue, cataloguing or parameter setting.
This logical separation is partly the consequence of the introduction in the
version v0.3.01 of views per organization. It became difficult to define
and clearly present the possible actions to be taken by a member of staff on
a particular view, or the information intended for any visitor or online
reader. Furthermore, the professional interface benefits from being dynamic, in
order to avoid recharging the page after each action, while the public
interface is more easily indexed by search engines if the pages are static,
which is relevant for bibliographic records. Finally, this choice allows to
share part of the professional interface between RERO ILS
and SONAR projects and, thus, to
mutualize the development effort2.
The development of v0.6.0 has been largely determined by the
workshops carried out and the establishment of a specific
instance for pilot libraries’ tests. From
this point of view, it is now possible to customize the views of different
organizations with a specific header colour and logo. Most importantly, the
processes for Virtua’s data migration to RERO ILS have been
completed in order to import an entire RERO institution.
The interface for the circulation module has been redesigned and now offers more information on circulation events upon return of items requested, late or in transit. The librarian now has a unified view of the reader’s account in different tabs: borrowed items, requests, fees, personal information. As for the public interface, the account also offers new functionalities such as extending loans, accessing loan history and cancelling requests.
Work continues on the data model with publication and editing fields, as well as an editor supporting embedding of fields on four levels or more. And work on the acquisition module has begun with the addition of fiscal years, accounts, orders, order lines and suppliers.
Release v0.7.0
Librarians are now able to place a request on an item for a reader, as shown in the animation below. Professionals have a tab for the readers' fees with the possibility of paying partially or completely for the fees, to cancel them, to mark them as contested, or, conversely, to resolve a dispute. A detailed history is provided for the fees, along with the details of all events. These fees are generated automatically when a loan has exceeded the return deadline. They may also be related to other library services, such as photocopies, interlibrary loans, subscriptions or for when an item has been damaged or lost.
As for the data model, complex work has been carried out for the title and the transformations needed for the conversion from MARC to JSON, as well as for the URL addresses. A wiki has also been added in order to have online help available for the professional.
See release note. ↩︎
For those of you who are interested in how it works under the hood, this change resulted in the creation of two more repositories on GitHub: ng-core, an angular project that brings together what’s common to RERO ILS and SONAR, as well as rero-ils-ui, also an angular project that implements the RERO ILS of the professional interface. ↩︎