Five Colleges ERM Go-Live!

Hello Five Colleges!

I am excited to announce that we have officially gone live in the electronic resource management suite in FOLIO!!!! This has been a huge effort from members of the Five Colleges staff and has taken the better part of two years, but as of Tuesday August 25th we officially entered production and became the first consortium to adopt FOLIO as a single tenant environment. But what exactly does Going-Live mean? It isn’t as simple as throwing a switch. Tons of work has been going on in the background to ensure that the moving parts of CORAL, Aleph, the EBSCO Admin, dozens of spreadsheets, and FOLIO itself aligned this summer for a successful migration.

Way back in May 2019 my working group, FERM (FOLIO Electronic Resource Management), began meeting to discuss how we would implement a shared ERM system. Three of the Five Colleges currently use CORAL for this purpose, and we all use Aleph to track acquisitions and cataloging of electronic resources. At the time, we were all using SFX as a link resolver and managing EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) in the EBSCO Admin. Add to that list systems like OCLC for cataloging, EBSCONet for serials, eBook purchasing platforms, EZProxy servers, and many, many emails we were trying to manage individual resources sometimes in 5 or more places! The purpose of FOLIO is to cut that number way down. Having a single place to go to for information on a resources license, order history, discoverability, and lifecycle will allow us to work more effectively at our institutions and doing it in a shared environment will allow us to work more collaboratively across the Five Colleges.

When we decided in October 2019 to switch up our timeline and adopt the ERM suite first, FERM began a months long process to define systems settings, discuss workflows and shared experiences, articulate what existing data should or should not be migrated, set up permissions, and advocate for our needs in the FOLIO community. Now, in August 2020 we have reached a point where our work is beginning to pay off. I want to take a moment to thank all of those involved in both FIT and FERM who made it possible for us to shift gears and in under a year complete an implementation that we expected to happen after we left Aleph. Without their hard work none of this would have been possible.

But now that we’re live, what happens next? The short answer is: everything. We will continue to be partners in an open source community for as long as we use FOLIO, and have the opportunity to watch it mature and ensure that it can meet our needs. We will continue to attend special interest groups (SIGs) and act as subject matter experts for the development teams so that FOLIO can evolve to meet the challenges we can’t yet see. We will continue to work together here at the 5C to make the shared environment of FOLIO a success and to find ways to support each other in the ERM world. And of course, we still need to migrate Aleph.
Thank you to everyone involved in the FOLIO project here at the 5C. Here’s to more successful Go-Lives in the future!

-Jack Mulvaney

On behalf of FERM

FERM & FOLIO: What does it all mean?

Hello Five Colleges!

If you’re looking for a better understanding of the electronic resource management apps in FOLIO, then look no further! Owen Stephens, a UK developer who acts as product owner for the Agreement and License Apps has developed a glossary for the two apps with explanations what each field is expected to be used for as well as default settings and reference values. Please note, the FOLIO Electronic Resources Management (FERM) Working Group has customized our settings and reference data so the values in the spreadsheets below may not reflect what appears in the 5C tenant settings. Owen has put out several spreadsheets which are linked below:

Agreements App Field Glossary
Agreements App Default Values

Licenses App Field Glossary
Licenses App Default Values

FERM will be working over the next several weeks to stress test our customized values and will submit changes to the hosting team at EBSCO. We expect much of what is currently in the Daisy settings to migrate into Edelweiss. Once we’ve finalized our settings and reference data we will be creating local versions of the above spreadsheets as well as some best practices for working in the FOLIO ERM apps. If you have questions on a field, see something you think might be missing, or just want to learn more – please reach out to your local FERM member or to me (jmulvaney@umass.edu) and we can try and get you an answer.

FERM meets twice a month to discuss FOLIO ERM as well as our mutual Full Text Finder (FTF) migrations. If you’d like us to consider something for discussion please send it to your local FERM rep.

FERM & FAWG Joint Meetings Report

FOLIO Implementation Consultant, Anya Arnold, was visiting this week with many groups at the Five Colleges. Several decisions were made which will impact our FOLIO use going forward. The first of these is the decision to go forward with implementation in June/July with licenses/agreements for continuing electronic resources including the orders accompanying those new resources. This means that e-journals and e-journal packages, ebook packages, and databases will be implemented this summer using the FOLIO modules of Organizations, Agreements, Licenses, and Orders.

Another decision made jointly by FAWG (FOLIO Acquisitions Working Group) and FERM (FOLIO Electronic Resource Management) is that we will always use the same two-letter institutional codes to denote the individual schools in the Five Colleges. These codes will be in CAPS followed by a space in most FOLIO modules. In the Acquisitions module, the prefix will be the two-letter code (no space) followed by numbers. The codes used will be the same ones we are currently using in FOLIO: AC-Amherst, HC-Hampshire, MH-Mt Holyoke, UM-UMass, SC-Smith. We anticipate that this can be used in apps that will not be brought up this summer and are working with members of the other working groups to make sure this method will be used globally in FOLIO.

Please reach out to a member of FAWG, FERM or FIT (FOLIO Implementation Team) if you have any questions about these recent decisions or other general FOLIO concerns/comments. We would love to hear from you!