Folio¶

Folio is a new open source ILS system created by https://indexdata.com and a number of (at least) American universities. According to a presentation held in Barcelona a few weeks ago, where some of the UAB librarians assisted, the system is still in development and not mature enough to be used in production.

Summary¶

• Home page: https://www.folio.org/
• Development page: https://dev.folio.org/, https://github.com/folio-org
• Current version:
• Bibliographic format: seems to be proprietary
  • there is a MARCcat group handling Marc Cataloguing
  • they seem to separate internal storage in their proprietary format entirely form cataloguing (ie. the idea is you could catalogue in whatever format you want, keep this and serialize to the internal format; currently discussed is at least Marc21 and bibframe as primary cataloguing formats)
• License: Apache 2
• Technical requirements: Java, Javascript, PostgreSQL, quite a few frameworks. Microservice based, could be extensible in any language that talks REST to the system, but the core seems to be JAVA, UI in JavaScript.
• Demo site (according to https://wiki.folio.org/): https://folio-testing.aws.indexdata.com/ (login: diku_admin / admin)

There are several demo sites also at least at GBV and hbz.

Comments¶

@aw-bib¶

Also EBSCO invested quite heavily into Folio. So there is definitely some commercial interest in this game and the main solution is to be a cloud based library system.

In Germany there are also at least two larger union catalogues involved in the development:

• VZG for the GBV in Göttingen
• hbz (Cologne)

@aw-bib would argue that especially the involvement of VZG/GBV is a good thing. VZG is responsible for the by far largest union catalogue in Germany including a very broad spectrum of libraries from one of the largest university/special libraries in Germany (like TIB/UB Hannover) down to really small public libraries. Additionally, there some sort of coalition between GBV and SWB, and SWB itself is quite specialized in hosting services for a broad range of libraries, both on the large and on the small end.

Taking all this into account Folio seems to be an alternative on the longer run. Right now @aw-bib would agree with the assessment of the colleagues from Barcelona that its a product in a very early stage and he also agrees that probably others should get the bloody noses to get it up and running and find/solve the worst bugs. Additionally, @aw-bib just saw a lot of stuff on the backend (which is good from a certain perspective) but not much on the user facing front end.

Additionally, right now (07/2019) @aw-bib does not see any repository-like infra structure but basically a cloud based library system. Which is good in the sense that it's a lot easier to add full text handling to a data model like Marc21 than real data to a data model like Dublin Core. However, @aw-bib believes that to get stuff into the core of Folio one is at least on the same footing as getting stuff into invenio-core.

In summary, @aw-bib believes that Folio

- may be an alternative to <place your current ILS here> further down the road
- is not a system to run locally, but to get a hosted solution
- is not a system to do real development on, unless one really can and wants to really play with the big guys (dependencies met, @aw-bib believest one could just easily set up invenio3)

Status at join2¶

As of 08/2020, Forschungszentrum Jülich is investigating Folio as an alternative to invenio3. This results mainly from the fact that as an ILS all normalization requirements (authorities) should be met in Folio already. As some larger universities in Germany want to replace their current systems by Folio one can assume that this is a fact and not only a wish. (Simply due to requirement from the union catalogues).

First findings¶

• Folio is a pure backend librarian cataloguing system without any frontend (neither search nor submit)
• vuFind (already at work in FZJ) can be used for the display logic
• FZJ got a running instance after some minor issues in the install procedure
• Adoptions for vuFind are in the making to get a presentation layer

Todo:

• User-Submission
• Full text handling

@aw-bib it is still somewhat unclear if one could easily use the stuff from Jülich for join2 in general. Most likely it would require quite a bit of abstraction to use it. At least this were the comments once join2 discussed if one could use juLib (the adoption of vuFind for Jülich) as a modern looking presentation layer for Invenio1. After some initial steps further exploration on this front was stopped. So this current implementation is more a proof of concept.