2021-9

Initiatives of Chinese Alliance for Library Service Platform

Initiatives to establish the Chinese Alliance for Library Service Platform were officially launched at the beginning of 2021. Currently, the three founding members, consisting of Shanghai Library, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Library and Jiangsu Jiatu, are recruiting more members to join, and 20-30 members are expected to join soon, not including several dozen institutions in the Shanghai regional consortium.

Since July 2021, the Alliance has created newsletters and hosted webinars monthly. The newsletters titled “LSP Trends” include sections such as "Domestic Trends", "Overseas Progress/Progress Abroad“, “Successful FOLIO Cases”, "Training Materials”, "FOLIO Q&A,” and more. The three issues of newsletters released have attracted over 3000 visits so far. The alliance hosted two webinars and conducted one expert interview on the theme of FOLIO and smart library related technologies and applications. About 1,000 people from libraries, information schools, and companies registered and attended the webinars. The Alliance also created its own website (https://www.calsp.cn/) in July 2021. The site introduces FOLIO and the Alliance in all aspects of resources, products, conferences, etc. The total visits to the website has reached about 12,000.

The Alliance has been preparing for two conferences recently. The one with the theme of “Yunhan Smart Sharing - Information Technology for Libraries (IT4L 2021)” will be held on October 22, 2021. In addition to inviting local and global experts to give keynote presentations at the conference, the Alliance will form an expert committee and will announce the Yunhan system/platform with FOLIO as the core technology. The Alliance is also planning to host the “WOLFcon Asia-Pacific Conference” at Shanghai Library December 2021, at which the core suite of the Yunhan/FOLIO system/platform will be introduced. (To facilitate local promotion, Yunhan is used as the Chinese name of FOLIO by the Alliance.)

At Shanghai Library, the development of various features/functions that is based on the FOLIO platform is also accelerating. The book reservation services that went live in July allows patrons to make reservations for items in closed stacks through VuFind. The Library also launched self-checkout services in August. A single machine lends an average of 140 books per day. Based on the FOLIO circulation services, Shanghai Library is developing an App for online book lending, which will enable readers to borrow books online and have them delivered to their door.

IT4L 2021 Conference    video 1    video 2