Dean B. Krafft
Chief Technology Strategist
Cornell University
Sebastian Hammer
President
Index Data
Since 2016, the FOLIO community of librarians, designers, developers, service providers, and vendors, led by EBSCO, the OLE Partners, and Index Data, has been working together to develop a new open source library services platform (LSP). The first major application of that platform will be a new integrated library system (ILS), currently being created through the work of over 60 application/UX developers and over 100 library functional experts. Release of a fully functional FOLIO-based ILS is scheduled for the second half of 2018, with initial beta-partner implementations planned by the end of this year. Four OLE Partners, Cornell, Lehigh, Texas A&M, and University of Chicago, are planning to implement in July 2019. In this project briefing, we will provide an overview of the full FOLIO partnership; a status report and timeline for the implementation of the ILS modules; a brief walk-through of the look and feel of the system; a look under the hood at how the platform serves to coordinate all the elements of the ILS and integrate with external services; and a brief exploration of how community members are already stretching the platform beyond the traditional boundaries of an ILS. We will also describe how interested libraries, service providers, and vendors can join the FOLIO community, and the resources that will be available to enable them to implement or integrate with FOLIO and the new ILS.