On Wednesday, February 19, we held our quarterly Duke FOLIO Forum. This quarter, we presented about the Edelweiss release, the time lines for both the larger project and our local implementation, shared information from WOLFcon20, and Erin Nettifee gave a tour of the FOLIO Project site on the Duke Wiki.

International Project Update

Edelweiss was released on January 10. This release has added 89 new features, and thanks to the FOLIO Bug Fests, fixed a record number of bugs! We have about 10 staff on the list for testing in the FOLIO Bug Fests, and they’re

bringing the skills they’ve learned back to our local implementation project. Many thanks to our testers!

The international FOLIO project continues on with scheduling the remaining features that need to be added. The libraries that are planning to go live this summer with a sub-set of FOLIO applications have created lists of the minimum functionality required for them to go live. The product owners are working with the lists to match Jira issues to the functionality. The group of libraries and the functionality needed can be found on the Round II list. The list includes Duke’s adoption of the ERM functionality. There are lists being curated to account for the needs of the libraries going live in 2020 with the MVP, and those (including Duke) going live in 2021 with the full implementation. You can find those lists on the FOLIO wiki under the Implementers Group; Working Groups section.

Duke sent 11 representatives to WOLFcon20 hosted by Texas A&M. We reviewed the schedule ahead of time with the intention of getting to as many FOLIO sessions as possible. On top of the usual special interest group meetings, a company called Arkivum partnered with EBSCO, and gave a plenary session on their product, Perpetua. Perpetua is a digital preservation system, which uses the FOLIO codex to search and connect with repository software and special collections. The plan is to release that software as open source in the future. About 10 staff from Shanghai Public Libraries attended WOLFcon and spoke about their plans to create a circulation app based on the FOLIO architecture to be able to handle 100 million circulation transactions a year! The sheer size and number of libraries and borrowers that the Shanghai Public Library system handles is mind-boggling. A few of the Chinese representatives reached out to Duke staff to learn more about our implementation plans and requirements. An interesting addition to this WOLFcon was presentations about how institutions are actually interacting with FOLIO. Chalmers gave a presentation on their support structure for both local bugs and bugs that need to be reported back to the larger project. The Data Migration SIG representatives from Index Data, Chicago and Texas A&M presented on how they’re loading data and the issues they’re running into. And the Accessibility SIG demonstrated the progress they’re making on ensuring FOLIO meets Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines 2.1 AA and has VPAT certification. WOLFcon21 will be held in Hamburg, Germany.

Local Project Update

The LSP Steering Group held a kickoff meeting on January 8 for our local working teams to meet, learn about their roles on the teams, and more specifics on how the teams will work together.

Our local instance, hosted by Index Data, is up and the local project team members have access to it. At the moment, there’s minimal configuration and no data. We’ll be working with Index Data to get our Aleph data imported. They’ll also be available to help the project teams with implementation support and custom development. Index Data is also supporting FOLIO implementations for the University of Chicago, Lehigh University, and the Fenway Library Organization (FLO). We’ve already scheduled a standing meeting with Index Data and the other institutions they’re supporting so we can share local updates, work on common issues, and learn from each other.

Our local timelines are becoming more concrete as our local teams have started meeting. The ERM Implementation Team will be meeting with the Configurations Working Group in March to go over the configurations needed for the Licences app, and possibly the Agreements and eUsage apps. They’ll need to work with the User Permissions and Workflow Working Groups in early Spring to set up and test permission sets, and to understand the local workflows. Also this spring, the Configurations Working Group and the Data Working Group will be hosting a series of meetings to discuss how Duke will implement FOLIO’s four-level location hierarchy.

Finally, Erin showed us around the FOLIO project node on the Duke Wiki. Duke Staff will need to log in to see everything, as it’s not all open to the public.

We look forward to seeing you at the next Forum! Date and time coming soon.

Slide deck: Duke FOLIO Forum 2020219, Speaker notes