Development Support for FOLIO at Texas A&M University Libraries:  A One Year Check-In

Session Time: 11:00 AM- 12:00 PM

At the start of January 2022, Texas A&M University Libraries went live with FOLIO for production library services, leaving aside the Voyager ILS that had been in production for 20+ years.

Data migration from the legacy Voyager ILS to FOLIO was a large undertaking that evolved over the two years that TAMU was contributing to development leading up to the initial deployment.  The procedure had to continually adapt to a changing data model before the final migration.

In terms of maintaining feature continuity, there are several main areas of concern.  The new public catalog was implemented using FOLIO's OAI-PMH data to populate VUFind.  Reporting is a major requirement for any ILS and satisfies fiscal, accreditation, and analysis needs -- our Voyager infrastructure provided dozens of reports, mostly in Perl and SQL, that needed re-implementation.  In addition, a new solution for spine-label printing was required, for which we adapted a tool originally provided by ExLibris for use with Alma.  Also, the MyLibrary and Get it for me Button needed to be updated to interact with FOLIO’s API.

As luck would have it, our historic ILS transition coincided with significant organizational changes at Texas A&M and career changes among many TAMU Libraries faculty.  We will discuss our experience navigating this institutional transition at the same time as the FOLIO adoption.