Courses and Inventory apps live in production!

by Erin Nettifee
In June 2021, a small team launched Course Reserves in FOLIO, marking the second FOLIO functional area to “go live” in advance of our full launch in 2022.

The project began in Summer 2020 when Mark Deutsch, former senior developer in LSIS, developed an LTI edge module for FOLIO. LTI stands for Learning Tools Interoperability, and is a common development standard for outside apps and tools to talk to learning management systems like Sakai, which Duke uses to support online courses. Chris Lorch in Learning Innovation helped to create an LTI tool in Sakai that used Mark’s new functionality to course materials on reserve automatically to students in their course in Sakai, along with the rest of their course content. That way students know which items the library has (electronic or print) that they can access for their coursework, potentially saving them hundreds of dollars.

In January 2021, a small group of Resource Access staff members – Jeremy Martin (Perkins), Andrea Loigman (Perkins,) Sarah Griffin (Music), and James Britt (Law) – came together with LSIS to carry out a project to deploy Courses for Duke in Summer 2021. With a long list of tasks to accomplish, the group met weekly to do things like learn how the Courses app works, develop new processes for putting items on reserve in FOLIO, and decide what data needed to be migrated from Aleph to Courses. While the group was focused on those tasks, Mark continued helping the project by migrating course information from Aleph into FOLIO, while Jeff Fleming worked on migrating Duke bibs, holdings, and items into our production instance of FOLIO so that they could be put on reserve when we went live.

With all members of the team involved, we were able to go live in mid-June, allowing staff at Perkins Library to support any summer term 2 courses and be ready to begin support for fall courses when faculty requests for course materials start coming in. The East Campus Libraries will join the Reserves effort in Fall 2021, and we look forward to supporting other interested schools after we go fully live on FOLIO in Summer 2022.

In addition to Courses going live this summer, we took on the project of updating the Top Textbooks page to use the FOLIO Courses data and to update the back end software used for that page. For the Top Textbooks program, the libraries purchases the titles for the 100 most enrolled classes at Duke, allowing students easier access to their course materials. Early in the pandemic, we turned off the previous Top Textbooks page that had been running on Simile. The new version uses Airtable. Many thanks to the Resource Access staff listed above for their work on updating the FOLIO data, and to Erin Nettifee and Angela Zoss for their work on developing and testing the resulting web page.

Local Timeline Change

by Karen Newbery

In her August 9, 2021 letter to the DUL staff, Deborah Jakubs announced that our plans to go-live with all of FOLIO in 2022 have been delayed. Our Duke colleagues who have been deeply involved in the FOLIO implementation have ranked over 275 features out of all the FOLIO features that we consider critical to our implementation. As Deborah stated, “At this time about 40% of those (275) features have been developed. As a large academic library system with more than 270 staff, over eight million bibliographic records, thousands of print serials, even more electronic resources, and 275,000 circulation transactions per year, we must be able to count on a platform that is able to handle our work with speed and accuracy at scale…Our commitment to FOLIO is strong, and we will continue to implement incrementally as core modules and applications are ready and fully meet our requirements for productivity.  We will continue to prioritize our commitment to providing subject matter expertise, product ownership, and contributions to software development in order to make FOLIO the library services platform that libraries of the complexity of Duke’s need. On behalf of EG and the larger FOLIO leadership community, thank you very much for all your contributions to the success of this promising new platform.”

The Library Services Platform Steering Group met on September 13, and discussed plans for FOLIO work in the fall and Library Data Cleanup Project. The FOLIO implementation will directly benefit from this project and we need to adjust our plans to allow members of our implementation teams and working groups to work on the Cleanup Project. Over this fall, work will be done to finish loading data and configure local permission sets so we can adjust our focus to testing new releases as they come out.

International Project Updates

Cornell University implemented all of FOLIO this summer! The first of our peer libraries to go live with all of FOLIO. They’ve shared that things are going well. They had many processes that had not been automated for their old system, which made it easier to switch to FOLIO than some other universities. Texas A&M and the University of Chicago had planned to launch FOLIO this summer, but decided to hold off. TAMU found some issues integrating with their VuFind discovery layer, and Chicago found various automations that individual departments were doing on their own with Access data bases and linking directly to their underlying OLE data. It’s going to take more time to account for those issues.

Watch This

If you’re interested in some behind-the-scenes technical work, check out the Sprint Reviews. In these forums, developers and product owners demonstrate work that has been completed over the past two weeks.

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