ArchivesSpace User Advisory Council Reports Subgroup

August 31, 2015 ,11:00-11:50 EDT

Attendees: Nancy Enneking, Carolyn Runyon, Nikki Thomas, Brad Westbrook

Absentees: Alston Coburn

Agenda

• Introducing new members to the reports team and current issues
• Review of ASpace user meeting, Reports breakout session take-aways
• Next steps

Minutes

Nancy noted that Alston was unable to attend and that she would try to fill her in one-on-one in the near future.  Nikki is going to start by seeing if she can get Jaspersoft Community installed and trying to access the ASpace reports from the Apace 1.3.0 zip download file.

The group walked through some of the slides for the breakout session and combined discussion of takeaways with next steps.

Issues

• System performance isn't great.  Brad noted that there was a tacit agreement to move reports to a back end which should help, though there isn't a specific timeline – probably after the release of 1.4 (at the end of September).  Nathan is leaving and it has yet to be determined whether or not he will be doing contract work for ASpace.  Chris Fitzpatrick will be pulled into reports a little bit, but not until after 1.4 is released.
• Need for a detailed list of tables, fields, and criteria used in each report.  The group will schedule a tutorial during the last two weeks of September with Nathan Stevens to walk through both a report and JasperSoft, to see how this stuff is structured, where the Get commands are stored, etc.
  
  • Next step: Nancy will start looking at the reports and start some lists
  • Next steps: Nancy will get in touch with Nathan to start putting together the tutorial
  • Next steps: The group will (depending on Alston's schedule) schedule some Skype conference calls on Friday afternoons Eastern time (somewhere in the 1-3 – must stop a little before 4:00) to start going through Jaspersoft and reports so that we can prepare our questions for Nathan and make good use of his time
• Brad asked if a tutorial for the ASpace community on using Jasper Studio would be useful; the group felt that it would, but the tutorial would need to be a regular quarter/semester course!
  
  • Next step:  Not sure how to proceed to actually help people with Jaspersoft Studio; maybe ideas will present themselves after we have the tutorial with Nathan.
• CSV and Excel output is not useful as currently formatted.  The formatting is all based on the report layout in Jasper, which is laid out to be a (arguably) pretty pdf.  This is useful for some things, but people REALLY need tabular data.  A clear takeaway from the breakout session at the user meeting was a preference for tabular reports over new/additional reports.  Carolyn noted that some reports do lend themselves to tabular formats and that others are more problematic.
  • Next step: Carolyn will start examining existing reports, determine which might lend themselves to tabular formats.
  • Next step: Rearrange data fields in appropriate reports to provide a tabular layout.  Decide whether or not to replace existing ASpace report with new layout (or add a variant).
  • Next step:  Check and see if Jasper allows the generation of a RTF format.
• Parameters (or lack thereof).  All agreed that because of the increased number of legitimate data entry choices available to users (whole v. part extents; use of events v collecting mgmt. v. other options for tracking actions), users need a greatly increased number or report parameter choices.  More need to be built into the interface in the short term, and we need a new type of interface/selection screen in the background jobs. During the breakout session, the idea was raised to have the reports module be removed from the core application and made a standalone module that would point at the application backend – which would make the programming easier.  The Subteam was worried that this would provide an increased number of technical issues for the numerous repositories with little to no IT support. The idea of having a 3^rd interface (one for reports in addition to the existing staff and public interfaces) was touched upon.  Brad noted that any work along these lines would have to come after the current work on the public interface was finished and even then timelines would need to be evaluated in terms of priorities (EAD3).
  
  • Next step:  Needs further discussion with Brad and Chris after the release of 1.4.
• Meeting adjourned at 11:50 EDT.