EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is providing grants to four academic libraries as part of the EBSCO FOLIO Innovation Challenge. The grant program is awarding up to $100,000 in grants to libraries to develop innovative technology solutions that address the challenges academic libraries face. The second round's winning proposals came from the University of Alabama, the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, the Johns Hopkins University and Lehigh University.
The University of Alabama has plans to create data collection, reporting and analysis tools designed to support the core reporting module for FOLIO. Leveraging the FOLIO platform's data warehouse along with data science, machine learning and external data sources, the development team at the University of Alabama Libraries wants to help build upon the successes they have had in building custom reporting solutions to share with the greater FOLIO community.
The University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign (UIUC) will share the innovative work they have done with their kiosk-based wayfinding mobile app with the FOLIO community. The Technology Prototyping Service team at UIUC Library developed a mobile app for both iOS and Android that works with the library's collections to help users navigate both a library's physical and electronic collection. This team will work to improve and deliver this mobile app to the FOLIO platform.
The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) will be building out a set of APIs on the FOLIO platform that helps to expose a library's collection in FOLIO's Codex data repository. These APIs will allow apps to work with the library's collection as defined in the Codex to expose the collection in innovative ways. The Library Applications development group at the JHU Libraries will also be working to include additional administrative functionality for library staff and patron-facing apps that leverage these APIs to help patrons better explore and access the library's collection.
Lehigh University has been working to solve a problem that plagues libraries of all types and will help to bring their Lost Item Application to the FOLIO community. Managing lost items requires collection decisions and actions to take place across multiple departments in the library. Lehigh University will implement their Lost Item Application on the FOLIO platform to help bridge services between collection librarians and technical services librarians in a way that will streamline and automate the processing of lost items.
FOLIO is a community effort EBSCO is helping to fund and provide development and project management resources for, designed to create an open source library services platform that can also be used as a platform for innovation. Libraries of all sizes will be able to take advantage of the open source code, and companies including EBSCO will be available to provide hosting and services for libraries without a large technical services staff. The FOLIO Platform is being designed for extensibility to help libraries increase their on-campus footprint through innovation and new services to faculty and students alike. The FOLIO Community is also working together to solve the challenges libraries face today and in the future using microservices and a platform built for change.
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