Development Support for the TAMU Libraries Transition to FOLIO – A One Year Check-In

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. The TAMU Libraries development team played a central role throughout the transition by contributing to the worldwide community effort of FOLIO software development, providing local solutions for data migration, and reimplementing TAMU Libraries’ suite of legacy services in the new framework. In the process, the development team experienced its closest involvement thus far with our librarian colleagues and gained many insights into practical librarianship.

Migration of data from the Voyager ILS to FOLIO was a large undertaking that evolved over two years. On the face of it, this is the sort of Extract, Transform, and Load task common in information systems – but developers had to adapt to different database schemas and APIs as the FOLIO product was developed. Hundreds of trial migrations were run for different data types (Users, Vendors, Purchase Orders, Bibliographic Records, etc.) before the final migration that populated the initial FOLIO deployment.

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. This process is mostly complete but is still ongoing. In support of reporting, we introduced two new FOLIO modules with the aim of enabling needed business process workflows for some of the reports. These modules are mod-workflow, which allows FOLIO to register and invoke workflows through an external workflow engine, and mod-camunda, a reference implementation in production at TAMU which interfaces with the Camunda workflow engine. For simpler SQL-based reporting, we are exploring business intelligence tools such as CloudBeaver and Superset.

Spine label printing presented an interesting problem, as there was no integrated solution that shipped with FOLIO. However, ExLibris corporation has provided an open-source desktop application for use with Alma, known as SpineOMatic. TAMU developers wrote a shim called mod-spine-o-matic to allow FOLIO to provide Alma-like responses for bibliographic records, allowing SpineOMatic to work in the FOLIO context.

Of final note are two additional services: MyLibrary, which allows patrons to manage their accounts; and the Get It For Me Button, which embeds customizable buttons in the VuFind catalog so patrons can request document delivery according to circulation rules. These applications were originally written to work with Voyager through a middleware service called the Catalog Service. This service formatted Voyager responses and data to be more easily consumed by our modern webapps. Happily, when we transitioned to FOLIO, we were able to modify how Catalog Service read data (from FOLIO rather than Voyager) and did not have to significantly modify MyLibrary or GIFM Button.

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.