FOLIO and Smart Libraries: Meeting the future needs of Chinese Libraries

The vision and concept of FOLIO have gained the attention and expectation from libraries. Its open and flexible service platform provides an approach to the realization of the Smart Libraries in the future. On the basis of summarising the needs of Smart Libraries in China, the paper expounds the architecture and ideas of providing smart services based on FOLIO. By analyzing the problems and challenges in the implementation and localization of FOLIO in China, the author points out that the“Chinese Alliance for Library Service Platform”(also called YunHan Alliance) should play a very important role in running the Chinese FOLIO community. It should steward the direction of the community, carry out the minimum open source software application suite, cultivate an open platform ecology, so as to support the new business models for the prosperity of Chinese libraries in the future.

Modularity in FOLIO: principles, techniques and tools

From its earliest inception, FOLIO was conceived not as an ILS (Integrated Library System), but as a true Services Platform, composed of many independent but interdependent modules, and forming a foundation on which an ILS or other library software could be built out of relevant modules. This vision of modularity is crucial to FOLIO’s appeal to the library community, because it lowers the bar to participation: individual libraries may create modules that meet their needs, or hire developers to do so, or contribute to funding modules that will be of use to a broader community — all without needing “permission” from a central authority. The technical design of FOLIO is deeply influenced by the requirements of modularity, with the establishment of standard specifications and an emphasis on machine-readable API descriptions. While FOLIO’s modular design has proved advantageous, it also introduces difficulties, including cross-module searching and data consistency. Some conventions have been established to address these difficulties, and others are in the process of crystallizing. As the ILS built on FOLIO’s platform grows and matures, and as other application suites are built on it, it remains crucial to resist the shortcuts that monolithic systems can benefit from, and retain the vision of modularity that has so successfully brought FOLIO this far.

FERM-ing up a Strategy for Consortial System Adoption: The Five College Consortium & FOLIO eResource Management

The Five Colleges are committed early implementers of FOLIO and beta adopters of EBSCO’s implementation and hosting services. We implemented the Agreements, eHoldings, Users, and Organizations apps in FOLIO during the summer of 2020 and will go-live on apps to replace our ILS by summer of 2022. Implementing the Agreements, eHoldings, Users, and Organizations apps took a significant amount of work as the management of this information and content has never been centralized or shared until now in our consortia. In this article we chronicle our path to build trust, construct a common understanding of methodology and terminology, and how we successfully migrated during a global pandemic.

The Future is Here! Embracing a New Era of Open Platforms

The Future is Here! Embracing a New Era of Open Platforms

How is FOLIO different from its predecessors?

FOLIO is a future-oriented library service platform. Enlightened by the results of the 2021 International Survey of Library Automation, the author shared thoughts on how FOLIO meets librarians’ expectations, why it’s a good time to get involved in the FOLIO project and what challenges FOLIO is facing at the current development stage.

Implementation of a secure room booking system at the University of Manitoba Libraries

Providing group study rooms is an important service offered by a university library to support learning and collaboration. A good room booking system should be convenient for students to use and would require a minimum involvement of library staff regarding managing bookings and keys. This article studied the implementation of the Juno Secure Room Booking system at the library to replace LibCal, which is a popular room booking system used by a large number of university libraries in North America. This article discussed the advantages that the Juno system has compared to LibCal, the design of an online booking website using the Juno Application Programming Interface (API), and the enhancement the library designed and developed based on student feedback. This article also discussed how the library successfully engaged a college to use this system to manage study rooms for classes and exams.

Lessons Learned about FOLIO’s APIs

APIs (Application Programming Interface) provide the ability to do what needs to be done. The fact that FOLIO includes API as one of its building blocks makes it that much more attractive. When my library’s administration decided to switch from a legacy ILS (Integrated Library System) to a FOLIO LSP (Library Services Platform) the first thing that I looked at was the API. The lessons learned helped me to configure the system and massage the data from ILS output to FOLIO-friendly input. By building web applications and writing Perl scripts our staff is able to get the job done even when it is impossible to accomplish the task through the user interface (UI).

Virtualization of Research Data Services during the COVID-19 Pandemic as an Opportunity to Enhance Research Data Support

For Canadian academic libraries, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated an unprecedented switch to virtual services. An abrupt halt to in-person activities required almost all libraries to utilize new technologies in order to continue serving patrons. While the Academic Data Centre (ADC) has traditionally offered both physical and online services, with the emergence of the pandemic, the ADC pivoted to exclusively online service provision. Through new initiatives such as remote desktop access to statistical software, embedded virtual spaces for consultation and breakout discussions, online workshops and teaching, and the use of social media--the Academic Data Centre emerged successful in supporting student and faculty data needs. While virtually scaling up data services was essential to avoid disrupting researchers working with data, the shift to online services also presented an unexpected opportunity to reflect meeting the data needs of users and, in turn, strategize innovative future data service delivery. Three themes emerged from our reflection: emphasis on greater accessibility; more flexible instruction; and the benefits for cultivating a data community. As emerge from the pandemic, the ADC expects to further embrace newly implemented technologies and virtual services to further scale and augment research data service support.

Book Review of Information Technology for Librarians and Information Professionals

This is a review of the book titled "Information Technology for Librarians and Information Professionals."

Cornell Library FOLIO Case Study

Cornell University is a private university with a public mission. With a student body of about 25,000, Cornell is the federal land-grant institution of New York State, a private endowed university, a member of the Ivy League/Ancient Eight, and a partner of the State University of New York. Cornell Library supports the university’s mission with 20 different physical and digital libraries, a collection of 8.5 million volumes and 1.7 million e-books, and about 400 staff. After 20 years using the vended application Voyager by Ex Libris as the Library’s integrated library system (ILS), on July 1, 2021 Cornell Library completed our migration to the open-source platform, FOLIO.