2023-06-23 Sys Ops & Management SIG Agenda and Meeting notes

Stewart Engart : Duke will be live with FOLIO ERM until June 2024, will then roll out to ALMA. We will host three different systems in parallel over the next year! 

Welcome Wilhelmina Randtke  : I am from Georgia Southern University, but we are in a consortium. This consortium consists of more than 20 members : https://librarytechnology.org/libraries/search.pl?ILS=FOLIO&ImmediatelyPreviousILS=Alma&HQ=on. They will all migrate together from ALMA to FOLIO. At the moment, their union catalogue is in an ALMA Network Zone, but that will be migrated to FOLIO. We plan to switch over in mid 2025. I will be responsible for data migration at my institution (not for the whole consortium). I have also joined the Data Migration Subgroup. Our FOLIO ILSes will be hosted by EBSCO.

Ingolf: How do you plan to share data between the different members of the consortium ? Will you upload data from your ILSes to the ALMA NZ ?

Wilhelmina Randtke : In ALMA Network Zone, there are 30 levels of permissions when it comes to editing data in the NZ. You can set it to zero, then this member is not allowed to do any modifications in the NZ. An editor of the NZ could have the maximum permission of 30. I am not so familiar with the concepts in FOLIO, yet.

Florian Gleixner : FOLIO does not have something like a union catalogue.

Ingolf Kuss : There are new functionalities in FOLIO built in mod-consortia. This will allow you to share data between members of a consortium. There will be a consortium tenant, but it will not hold bibliographic data which would be available to all consortia members. The consortia functionality of FOLIO are more about tenant permissions and cross-tenant login facilities.

Ingolf Kuss : Sharing data between an ALMA NZ and FOLIO as local ILSes will become extremely important for us (hbz-NRW). Wen have an Alma NZ as the union catalogue of hbz-NRW and need to connect local FOLIO ILSes to this catalogue. It is not yet clear what the data flow to and from the union catalogue will look like. Until recently, we had ALEPH as the central union catalogue. There were interfaces to download bib data to the ILSes (we have 6 or 7 different ILSes at the moment in our library network). For newspapers, also local data have been exchanged (with the German EZB electronic journal database). It is not yet clear how much of this will be adopted for Alma to FOLIO. We will have to talk about the interfaces on the FOLIO side and on the Alma side in the near future.

Florian Gleixner / Ingolf Kuss : The library structure in Germany is very heterogenous. There is a number of different consortia and they are all on different system, in various ways. This also pertains to the question of Discovery integration and interaction with the respective union catalogue. In GBV, for example, the Discovery system is directly connected to the union catalogue, while at hbz, the Discovery system needs to be connected to the local ILSses. We are only at the very beginning when it comes to the question of Discovery integration at hbz. There is much more to it than just oai-pmh. The rtac interface is being elaborated on in the Discovery subgroup of SysOps.

Florian Gleixner : I am working together with Florian Kreft in the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) of the Bavarian Library Network (BVB). We are system administrators and do not have so much knowledge of library metadata. We will self-host FOLIO because we have thousands of servers here. We want to transfer some knowledge about FOLIO to our system librarians so that they will be able to do elementary administrative tasks (e.g. assign more memory to an application) in the future.

Ingolf Kuss : I am somehow approaching this from the other direction. I am working in a group of system librarians and I am doing the technical work for this group. I have some knowledge about library metadata, data mapping between systems and migration setups. I am not a member of the central IT department. I would like to transfer some tasks (e.g. administration of a server cluster) from my librarians' group to an IT department. It could as well be an external IT department, but then probably one run by the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, rather than by an international company. The latter has data protection considerations as the reason.

Carol Sterenberg : I am moving to northern Texas next month and will change to Northern Texas University. I will continue to be around in the group because my new employer is also interested in FOLIO.