2021-12

The Chinese Alliance for Library Service Platform has been advancing its work in an orderly manner since September 2021. The Alliance sent out the fourth and fifth issues of the “LSP Trends” newsletters successively, one focusing on the introduction and promotion of FOLIO’s statistical module; while the other highlighting the ERM modules. Sections included  “Featured Articles”, “Dynamic Progress'', “Yunhan LSP”, “Reader Q&A”, "Training Materials" and other columns. A total of about 1500 people accessed the two newsletters.  The Alliance hosted two lectures, which were the fourth and fifth ones in the ”Smart Library Technology & Application Lectures'' series. The lectures mainly focused on the technologies of smart library platforms, microservices, and data middle platforms. About 500 people from public and academic libraries, and companies registered to attend the lectures. The website of the Alliance was upgraded in October and has attracted over 7,000 visits since September. 

On October 22, the Alliance held the “Yunhan Smart Sharing - Information Technology for Libraries (IT4L 2021)” conference. More than 100 librarians and SMEs from over 40 public and academic libraries as well as representatives from over 10 companies in the industry attended the onsite conference. Over 4,000 people watched the live stream on social media such as Tencent Conference, Tencent Conference Live Streaming and Bilibili Live Streaming. Li Xinwan (Director of Shanghai Jiaotong University Library), Tom Cramer (Deputy Director of Stanford University Library), Xu Qiang (Deputy Director of Shanghai Library), Xu Yibo (Director of Ningbo Library) gave featured talks. The original 38 experts were appointed to the Expert Committee of the Alliance, which held a closed meeting to discuss the development plan of the Yunhan platform after the appointment ceremony. (Note: For the convenience of local promotion, China’s FOLIO community is using “Yunhan'' as the Chinese name for FOLIO. )

The Alliance made good progress with member recruitment. Three public libraries have applied to join the Alliance since September.

The development of various functions of the platform with FOLIO as its core technology continue to accelerate at Shanghai Library. The Library started the trial run  on FOLIO with its circulation services in the open stacks in September. About 60% of the self-check machines were connected to the FOLIO circulation module. An average of over 1,000 books were checked out daily in November. The team completed the functional testing for the automatic sorting system, the circulation robot, and the 24-hour reservation cabinet that will be used at the East Building of the Shanghai Library, and will start the internal test in December. “Enjoy Borrowing with SHL”, the function of online requesting and delivery, was tested functionally and will be tested publicly this December.