On Wednesday, November 20, we held our second quarterly open forum for Duke Libraries’ staff. We shared updates on the international project, heard from members of three of the FOLIO special interest groups (SIGs), and an update on the project plan and timeline of Duke’s implementation.
Dracine Hodges led us off with an overview of the international project, starting with the advantages of FOLIO’s platform and it’s features. She shared an updated FOLIO development timeline that extends to the fourth quarter in 2020. 
We celebrated Chalmers’ being the first to launch FOLIO in production. And we learned more about the commitments other institutions have made and when they’re planning to launch FOLIO in their production environments.
FOLIO’s Round 2 early adopters are:
Erin Nettifee, Angela Zoss, and Matthew Harrington shared information about the SIGs on which they participate. Erin started us off with the User Management SIG. This SIG has been around since the early beginnings of FOLIO. The group was first focused on the technical details and data points that needed to be included in the User record. User Management is important because both patrons and library staff who use FOLIO are “users”. The difference between them is that library staff users (and student staff members) will have permissions assigned to them so they can do their work. Users holds basic data such as identification strings (think NetID, Duke Unique ID and library card barcode), address, and other identity management data. Users also holds fines and fees management, requests, and loans for the user. Some recent “wins” for users include easy manual creation of user records, proxy borrowing, and custom fields that can be different for each institution.
Angela serves on the Reporting SIG and talked about how the group has been collecting reporting requirements, mapping data elements, building the data warehouse, and writing the queries for the reports. They’ve been working on the Library Data Platform (LDP) which will take data exported from FOLIO, load it into a data warehouse that mimics FOLIO, and how the institutions will be able to add on a front-end reporting interface (or more than one!) that meets their needs.
Matthew shared details on how the Data Migration SIG has worked on creating crosswalks from various integrated library systems (ILS) such as Aleph and Voyager to FOLIO’s data model. Most traditional ILSs use flat relational databases to store data. FOLIO is using PostgreSQL with JSON objects. The JSON objects can contain a hierarchy of data, such as an array of addresses.
Karen Newbery, FOLIO Project Manager, spoke about Duke’s implementation plans. We’ve committed to using the ERM-focused FOLIO apps in production beginning in summer 2020. In summer of 2021, we plan to implement the entirety of the FOLIO apps. She shared we plan to organize teams and working groups to complete the FOLIO implementation.
Implementation Teams will be focused on the functional areas traditionally covered by an ILS – Resource Management (Acquisitions), Metadata Management (Cataloging and other data tasks), Resource Access (Circulation), and E-Resource Management. We separated ERM from Resource Management, since we’ll be implementing their suite of apps in summer 2020.
As we thought about the work that needs to be done, there were some task categories that surfaced, no matter which functional area we were thinking about. Those categories are Configuration, User Permissions, Data, Workflows, Documentation & Training, Functional Testing, and Reporting. We’re going to convene a working group for each of those task categories.
The implementation teams and working groups will work together to complete all the tasks for the implementation. We expect that the implementation teams will circulate throughout the working groups, allowing the working groups to focus on their tasks and having the implementation teams bring the subject matter expertise. We’ve gathered names of people we’d like to have serve on these teams and groups, and will be kicking them off in early 2020 with a team building and on-boarding opportunity.
Finally, we entertained questions that were submitted in advance of the forum, and answered questions from those in in attendance.
Slides from the presentation:
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