Attending: Chris Hallberg, Demian Katz, Claas Kazzer, Andrii Lysohor, Ere Maijala, Mario Trojan, Lionel Walter

The April, 2022 Newsletter was discussed.

JIRA data will be migrated to the cloud tomorrow (Wednesday, May 3) around 10am Eastern. There will be a brief outage during the migration. Post-migration, if you do not already have an Atlassian account, you may need to reset your password to access your tickets. Initial testing indicates that the process works pretty smoothly.

No news. Next step is to review progress on the pull request, when time permits.

No news.

Blended search – the ability to create a single result list combining records from multiple backends – is now available in the dev-9.0 branch and will be a major new feature of VuFind 9.0. If you are interested in this capability, please test out the dev-9.0 branch and provide feedback. Thanks to Ere Maijala and the team at the National Library of Finland for contributing this major new feature.

Recent user surveys have indicated a strong interest in improved use of authority data in VuFind, and several current VuFind users have built local enhancements around authorities. We should discuss whether some of this existing work can be generalized and shared to enhance the project and reduce local maintenance burdens.

Demian recommended reviewing Mario's IxTheo presentation for inspiration.

Questions and possible directions:

• Should we do more with the authority schema fields added by pull request #750 in 2016? They have never been used outside of facets.ini, and we don't have test records in our default continuous integration set to even demonstrate them.
• Should the authority schema be extended with any additional standard fields?
• How should we display authority data? Do we need to integrate the RecordDataFormatter (or something like it)? Do we need some kind of plugin mechanism for dropping in related content?
• Can we create something like IxTheo's Wikidata picture proxy to automatically (but flexibly/pluggably) load images on authority pages (or even search results)? The existing cover loader could be a model.
• Can we create something like IxTheo's BEACON API mechanism to look up relationships (again, flexibly/pluggably)?
• If we build a content plugin mechanism, what kinds of plugins can we build? Lists of relationships? Word clouds/charts?
• How can we better incorporate authority data into searches? (e.g. balancing use of identifiers with textual headings)
• Do we need to include more standard configurations/tools (or simply create more documentation in the wiki) for loading existing authority records (e.g. GND)?
• Is there a better solution than indexing parallel values across multiple Solr fields for storing complex data like authors with roles/identifiers?
• Should we use more elegant URL routing for authority records (/Authority/xxx instead of /Authority?id=xxx)?

Demian is hoping to work with the PMC to set a release date for 8.1 in the near future. If you have outstanding work or feature requests for inclusion in 8.1, please let someone from the PMC know as soon as possible before things get locked in place.

The next call will be Tuesday, June 7, 2022 at 9am Eastern Daylight Time (13:00 GMT).