This presentation by Boaz Nadav-Manes was part of a recent NISO virtual conference on community owned infrastructure. Boaz offered this as the abstract for his talk:
Lehigh University Library is a powerhouse of open-source systems development. It has gone fully live with FOLIO in August of last year; it is an institutional founder of Project ReShare; a user of Islandora and VuFind; and an active explorer of the SimplyE platform. The library has cultivated a risk-taking profile and culture and enjoys partnering with like-minded organizations to create innovative and sustainable ecosystems that question the status-quo and imagine new ways to make library intellectual work central to the university and the communities it belongs to.
Building on a long tradition of automation and utilization of staff's technical expertise, the Lehigh libraries have taken part in the 2008 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, submitted by the Duke University Libraries to "lead a community-driven process to produce a design document for an Open Library Management System built on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)." The proposal called for a multi-national team to "design a next-generation library system that breaks away from print-based workflows, reflects the changing nature of library materials and new approaches to scholarly work, integrates well with other enterprise systems, and can be easily modified to suit the needs of different institutions." The design document was intended to be a "blueprint to inform open-source library system development efforts, to guide future library system implementations, and to influence commercial Integrated Library System (ILS) protocols."
Twelve years later, these words resonate more than ever. Together with new partners, Lehigh Libraries continue to take a leadership role in the FOLIO governance and actively participate in the product development's full lifecycle.
In this case study, Boaz Nadav Manes (Lehigh's University Librarian) will share updates and thoughts about Lehigh's continued involvement in the FOLIO project and the library staff's pivotal roles in shaping the system development. He will outline the FOLIO implementation experience and discuss the opportunities, challenges, and potential to improve overall library operational efficiencies and effectiveness made possible through open-source and standards-based library platforms.
Click on the arrow above to watch the embedded video or click through here to view the recorded presentation on Youtube.
