Christopher Holly, Director of SaaS Innovation at EBSCO, presented and demonstrated FOLIO at the Mountain/Plains Library Association Conference in Albuquerque last Thursday. He demonstrated the Daisy release of FOLIO, which came out in September. The Edelweiss release should come out in December.

FOLIO functionality includes electronic and physical Resource Management, Circ, Cataloging, Acquisitions, and Reports. It also supports add-on apps, including non-ILS functionality. UIUC is designing some add-on apps for FOLIO; they presented at San Antonio User Group meeting last week. 

Workflow efficiencies are a key part of the FOLIO big idea. OLF (Open Library Foundation) is the governing body. They have their own YouTube Channel. 

FOLIO is designed in two-week sprints, which are recorded and made available online. There currently are 72 developers in the FOLIO developer community.  Chalmers University is using EBSCO for hosting services. 

FOLIO Services from EBSCO: Hosting via the Amazon Cloud; implementation services, in partnership with ByWater, including workflow analyses, change management, training, and third-party product innovation. 

He then gave workflow demos of a physical item, as well as of an electronic item. There is an API in place for GOBI. The Inventory app is used to manage physical items. FOLIO is an apps based system, not a traditional modular-based system (ACQ, CAT, CIRC, etc.). Bib records can be migrated in either direction between MARC and BibFrame. An unlimited number of notes can be added on the fly. 

Holley then demonstrated how to deal with e-resource management in FOLIO. E-holdings app ties directly to multiple knowledge bases. One update can be implemented across multiple knowledge bases. This really should streamline and save time and duplicative effort in our local processing. We even can use FOLIO to keep scanned copies of our e-resource agreements, so that they’re all in one place, searchable, and available online! E-Usage information also can be stored and accessed in FOLIO, too! In FOLIO, an “agreement record” is not a single license agreement, but rather a meta-record. 

All the FOLIO project stuff lives a wiki.folio.org.