We’re very excited to report that in February this year, CAVAL’s instance of the FOLIO library management platform and VuFind Discovery layer went live. You can now search the CAVAL Archival and Research Shared Collection (also known as the CARM Shared Collection) online, and check it out for yourself. We are currently using FOLIO primarily to manage the CAVAL Archival and Research Collection, but the platform will also provide the framework for our new ReShare resource sharing service, scheduled to go live later this year.
The FOLIO open-source library management platform is a relatively new contender to the library management system market, but both the National Library of Australia (NLA) and the Library of Congress (LoC) have recently announced imminent migrations from their current library management systems to FOLIO.
It’s pretty validating to find ourselves in such an illustrious company. We are super excited to see the new directions that FOLIO will take as a result, and how this will benefit the wider library community. LoC have already indicated in their implementation announcement that they intend to use FOLIO to pioneer the practical implementation of their new bibliographic metadata standard, BIBFRAME.
However, it’s not entirely surprising to us that major library institutions are transitioning to FOLIO, and it’s something we anticipated when we gave consideration to planning our own migration.
Proprietary, for-profit systems have their advantages, but their underpinning technologies are necessarily opaque, and they have been slow to evolve1. Libraries have little scope and few opportunities to directly drive the development of such systems. This is a bit of a concern, given that MARC is now 60 years old2, and libraries now do a lot of stuff other than circulate books, and there is both the need and the opportunity for innovation.
Libraries collectively pay astronomical amounts to purchase and maintain multiple stand-alone systems that frequently do not talk to each other to support core library activities3, and this is especially true for larger institutions like NLA and LoC, who are often running an absolute plethora of systems in order to support their service offering. For an organisation like CAVAL as well, many of our system requirements are quite bespoke to our unique role in the library industry, and it simply wasn’t feasible for us to consider a proprietary system – it simply wouldn’t have offered the flexibility we required.
We also want to take this opportunity to offer up big thanks to the team at Index Data, who have actively supported our migration and we will continue working with them to implement ReShare in the coming months (stay tuned!).
1 American Libraries Magazine. “2022 Library Systems Report,” May 2, 2022. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2022/05/02/2022-library-systems-report/.
2 20 years older than HTML, in fact, which is now in its 5th iteration
3 Breeding, Marshall. “Automation Marketplace 2013: The Rush to Innovate.” The Digital Shift, April 2, 2013. http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/04/ils/automation-marketplace-2013-the-rush-to-innovate/.
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