EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) and the Five Colleges Consortium have agreed to an EBSCO FOLIO Beta Partnership. The consortium includes Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. These institutions will leverage the FOLIO Library Services Platform in a variety of institutional scenarios.
The consortium is made up of four liberal arts institutions and one Association of Research Libraries (ARL) site (University of Massachusetts Amherst) which brings a variety of opportunities to work with technical differences and various staff sizes. While the consortium has a shared physical collection and a shared e-collection, the institutions purchase their own e-content separately. EBSCO also will be able to prove out a different migration path to the ILS used by Five Colleges.
FOLIO, which stands for the Future of Libraries is Open, is a community coming together to develop a reimagined library services platform, one that supports traditional resource management requirements and functionality, yet is engineered for innovation and growth through industry collaboration. FOLIO allows for extensibility into new services for libraries and will dramatically change the technology ecosystem available to libraries, service providers and technology developers.
The Five Colleges Consortium will use EBSCO Discovery Service™ as the library discovery interface so the colleges do not need to use multiple platforms for traditional catalogue functions such as checkouts and placing holds.
FOLIO, a community collaboration to develop an open source Library Services Platform (LSP), is being built in collaboration with dozens of organisations worldwide. The EBSCO beta program is an instrumental step in developing and establishing FOLIO as the primary platform for library management available to institutions around the world. EBSCO FOLIO Beta Partners will be testing FOLIO in large, real-world environments demonstrating the viability of the service and its role as a Library Services Platform.
EBSCO and other vendors ultimately plan to offer hosting and service enabling libraries of all sizes to leverage the full benefits of FOLIO and extend the reach of open source LSP software, which has been seen as only available to sites with large technical staffs.
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