On Tuesday, May 26, Drew University entered into an agreement with EBSCO Information Services which will provide the University Library with a FOLIO tenant in their production environment (aka cloud.) 

The first questions that we had to answer were:

  • Do you want any of the reference data pre-loaded, or a completely blank shell?

In my experience I have found that a good portion of what they are calling reference data (e.g. pre-fab item types) don't end up getting used and others need to be created. I would rather load all of the data from scratch rather than have to sift thru and delete what we won't use and add what we will. So I asked them to make it a completely blank shell.

  • SMTP server for outgoing emails – Do you want to use our SMTP server or Drew University's SMTP server?

We will start out using theirs. We can't change this setting in the FOLIO UI but if we decide that we want to (we could either use Google or Drew's internal SMTP server) we can ask EBSCO support to do that for us.

On the morning of Friday, May 29, we got word that our tenant had been built along with usernames and passwords so that we could begin working in our new system. Two minutes later (co-incidentally - the meeting had already been booked) the FOLIO Implementation Team (aka FIT) met to discuss some of the philosophies and priorities about how to accomplish the work of configuring the new system, migrating our bibliographic and user data from our old system, and training ourselves how to use FOLIO and draft documentation.

A few notes from FIT's meeting:

  • the timeline
    • support for our current ILS ends on June 30th
    • EBSCO wants to know what our Go Live! date is so that they can track this to make sure that they can help us be successful with getting to that date 
      • when we Go Live! they will decommission the test server
      • we will have an internal Go Live! that will give us at least a month to test and fix problems before our official Go Live! date which is the one that we will ask EBSCO to help us be successful with
      • we will be able to estimate what those dates might be after the system has been configured and the loading of data has begun
        • I expect user data will take a few hours and that bibliographic data will take about a week  
    • it would be a very good thing for Go Live! to be at least a few weeks before the building opens up again (mid August?)
    • Andrew must certify that we have "destroyed or returrned" the software and documentation of our current ILS by Spetember 30
  • the migration
    • it doesn't have to happen all at once - we can move users, titles, call numbers, and barcodes and then make another pass for subsets of the data like
      • sammelbands
      • shadowed stuff
      • marc holdings
      • current charges
      • bills and fines
  • documentation
    • it was our brainstorming about this that led to the creation of the space in Confluence
    • last I checked there was no documentation for FOLIO - we should check the wicki again but we will probably end up creating our own
  • participating and contributing to the FOLIO community

The May 29 email from EBSCO included URLs, usernames, and passwords...not all of which I understood. I've followed up to ask about them and will make notes about all of that when I get those answers.

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