5C Inventory & Record Merge Survey to Gather Workflows

The Inventory Working Group and Record Merge Working Group invites you to an open house on February 26, 2021. The purpose of this open house is to update the 5C community on the working groups’ activities and review metadata functionality in FOLIO. We will have 4 potential metadata and cataloguing workflows to review.

We would like to know about your metadata and cataloging workflows and to capture what those needs might be in FOLIO. Please use the linked Google form to submit this information. We would like to get the following information about each workflow: name, description, people involved, what FOLIO apps might be involved, how this workflow gets started, what the workflow is supposed to do in terms of an end result, and a brief outline of the steps involved. You can use the form as many times as needed to document each workflow. We realize that there will be unknowns. If you are unsure of some of your needs for a particular workflow, we understand. Please use the Comment section to make any notes about these unknowns or your questions. We will use this information to troubleshoot and advocate for our FOLIO future together!

Survey Details:

 Open House Details:

  • Day: Friday, February 26, 2021
  • Time: 2:00 -3:30 pm
  • Zoom URL

Tentative Agenda:

A presentation will be shared sooner to the date.

  • Introduction & Welcome
  • Updates from Inventory & Record Merge working groups
  • Discussions on 4 Workflows
    • Single Record cataloging
    • Multi Record cataloging
    • Batch Record cataloging
    • Batch Editing

This open house is open to everyone. We encourage you to join us in particular those who have a stake in our future shared bibliographic environment.

Best,

Jennifer Eustis & Ann Kardos

On behalf of the

FOLIO Inventory and Record Merge Working Groups

5C Record Merge Open House Recording Now Available

Thank you everyone who attended the recent 5C Bib Merge Working Group Open House. If you have any further comments on keeping or removing the 539 from bibliographic records, you can find the report in our 5C AAG Google Drive; if you don’t have access to this folder, let me know and I can send you the report. During this open house, the working groups shared information on what they are doing for a sharing FOLIO environment. If you have comments about these decisions, please contact any of the working group leads, your FIT liaison or post on our 5C FOLIO Slack channel.

If you are interested in a report on a MARC field in either bib or holdings records that is currently not in the shared reports folders, just let me know.

Below are links to recordings and documents.

Again I would like to than the members of the 5C working groups, the working group leads, Aaron Neslin, Steve Bischof, and our 5C FOLIO Implementation Team. GO TEAM!

Inventory Working Group announces data load success!

The work of the Inventory Working Group is largely a silent affair. We spent our time in fall 2019 and spring 2020 reviewing the community MARC to FOLIO data map. This means that we look at our Five College MARC metadata and see where it aligns with the community-planned mapping profile, and where it doesn’t. We maintain our data map and specify custom solutions if we need them. In Summer 2020, we also inventoried all of the fields in our Aleph item records and completed our own custom mapping of these fields into FOLIO item records.

The other part of our work involves reviewing and troubleshooting the Inventory application each time data is loaded into our Five College FOLIO tenant. Starting earlier this fall, we began testing loads of our entire catalog. This was no easy task to get more than 7 million records out of Aleph and into FOLIO. It may have been FOLIO’s largest record load at that time! Each time we load data there is some trial and error. We see what works, we see what breaks, we see where our MARC metadata is non-compliant and we figure out what needs to be tweaked and by whom.

In November, we were able to load our first ever batch of merged bibliographic files, thanks to all of the work done by the Record Merge Working Group. We had a few bumps, we made some corrections and we tried again. Before Thanksgiving we were able to implement the FOLIO community holdings record MARC data map and our new Five College Aleph to FOLIO item record field mapping.

Today, we’ve had some big successes! We’ve re-loaded our complete catalog, which equals more than 6 million merged and non-merged records. Out of 6 million records, only 186 records failed transformation and could not be added into FOLIO. This is a huge accomplishment! It is a direct result of the work done by the Inventory Working Group. But we couldn’t have done it without the many metadata professionals at all five colleges working on numerous catalog clean-up projects over the course of the last year.

Another success is that our item records 100% mapped into FOLIO according to our specifications. This is another big feat, and is remarkable because it was our first time implementing this map. We still have to see how this data will work for us, but it is there and available for viewing, testing and feedback by all!

I want to thank the Inventory Working Group: Laura Evans (Amherst), Jen Bolmarcich (Hampshire), Emma Beck (Mt. Holyoke), Sara Colglazier (Mt. Holyoke), Colin VanAlstine (Smith), and Jaime Taylor (UMass). I’d like to send a shout out to contributor and back-burner member Michelle Paquette (Smith). Thank you to former Inventory Working Group members because your contributions definitely helped us get to where we are today: Paul Trumble (Amherst), Suzanne Karanikis (Hampshire), Jane Pickles (retired from Hampshire), Rachael Smith (Mt. Holyoke) and Mary Ann Stoddart (retired from UMass). Extra special thanks to the Record Merge Working Group, Aaron Neslin (5C), Steve Bischof (UMass) and Anya Arnold (Ebsco) for answering all of my questions. And a final special thanks to Theodor Tolstoy, our Ebsco developer, who answers questions on Zoom and Slack (sometimes at odd hours because he’s in Sweden), and who tries to make our requests happen.

So let’s celebrate this small, yet huge milestone, on our path to FOLIO! I recognize that we have done the bulk of this work remotely and in a weird and overwhelming environment, which makes it all the more poignant. I look forward to many more successes in the coming months.

Cheers to us!

Ann Kardos, Lead, Inventory Working Group

Item Material Type Open House Recording

The Item Material Type Task Group (Jaime Taylor, Jack Mulvaney, Scott Stangroom, and Susan Kimball) would like to thank everyone who was able to join us at Friday’s Item Material Type Open House. It was nice to share the output of the work we’ve been doing for the last 3 months. We appreciate the discussion and input received from participants. Links to the slide deck, recording, and feedback form are below. Please submit feedback by noon on Friday, October 2nd so we can incorporate it into our discussion at the task group’s next meeting.
Item Material Type Open House Slides (including link to feedback form)

Direct link to Feedback Form

Please email Susan Kimball at sjkimball@amherst.edu with any questions.

FOLIO Update September 2020

It has been awhile since we have had a general update regarding the Five College’s implementation of FOLIO.  The good news is that during these trying times of COVID-19, work has continued on FOLIO, both at the broader community level and here at the Five Colleges.   The Five Colleges now have the latest release of FOLIO installed, ‘Goldenrod’, and are currently in  production for the core modules of Electronic Resource Management (ERM).   The Five College ERM working group did an amazing job testing software and looking at data migrated from both ALEPH and Coral.   A big shout-out to the Five College ERM working group for all their work on testing and to Aaron Neslin at UMass and Alex Soto at EBSCO for all their hard work related to data conversion of agreements and organization data.  Thanks to all their efforts, the Five Colleges have now begun managing parts of our e-resources using the Agreements and Organizations modules in FOLIO.

Work continues in other areas of FOLIO also.  Other Five College working groups have been busy evaluating data conversion related to inventory, continuing to work circulation rules and procedures, and working on acquisitions procedures and order data conversion.  Stay tuned for more information on these areas in the near future.

Additionally the FOLIO community at large is making a shift in the production release cycle.   FOLIO has been releasing a new version 4 times a year, which allowed for rapid deployment of new features.   However the FOLIO community will be moving to 3 major releases per year; March, July and November.  This will have some affect on our details of our schedule but it is something we need to evaluate in relation to new features we are waiting for and when they will be released.

Welcome to the start of the new academic year and stay safe.

Five Colleges ERM Go-Live!

Hello Five Colleges!

I am excited to announce that we have officially gone live in the electronic resource management suite in FOLIO!!!! This has been a huge effort from members of the Five Colleges staff and has taken the better part of two years, but as of Tuesday August 25th we officially entered production and became the first consortium to adopt FOLIO as a single tenant environment. But what exactly does Going-Live mean? It isn’t as simple as throwing a switch. Tons of work has been going on in the background to ensure that the moving parts of CORAL, Aleph, the EBSCO Admin, dozens of spreadsheets, and FOLIO itself aligned this summer for a successful migration.

Way back in May 2019 my working group, FERM (FOLIO Electronic Resource Management), began meeting to discuss how we would implement a shared ERM system. Three of the Five Colleges currently use CORAL for this purpose, and we all use Aleph to track acquisitions and cataloging of electronic resources. At the time, we were all using SFX as a link resolver and managing EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) in the EBSCO Admin. Add to that list systems like OCLC for cataloging, EBSCONet for serials, eBook purchasing platforms, EZProxy servers, and many, many emails we were trying to manage individual resources sometimes in 5 or more places! The purpose of FOLIO is to cut that number way down. Having a single place to go to for information on a resources license, order history, discoverability, and lifecycle will allow us to work more effectively at our institutions and doing it in a shared environment will allow us to work more collaboratively across the Five Colleges.

When we decided in October 2019 to switch up our timeline and adopt the ERM suite first, FERM began a months long process to define systems settings, discuss workflows and shared experiences, articulate what existing data should or should not be migrated, set up permissions, and advocate for our needs in the FOLIO community. Now, in August 2020 we have reached a point where our work is beginning to pay off. I want to take a moment to thank all of those involved in both FIT and FERM who made it possible for us to shift gears and in under a year complete an implementation that we expected to happen after we left Aleph. Without their hard work none of this would have been possible.

But now that we’re live, what happens next? The short answer is: everything. We will continue to be partners in an open source community for as long as we use FOLIO, and have the opportunity to watch it mature and ensure that it can meet our needs. We will continue to attend special interest groups (SIGs) and act as subject matter experts for the development teams so that FOLIO can evolve to meet the challenges we can’t yet see. We will continue to work together here at the 5C to make the shared environment of FOLIO a success and to find ways to support each other in the ERM world. And of course, we still need to migrate Aleph.
Thank you to everyone involved in the FOLIO project here at the 5C. Here’s to more successful Go-Lives in the future!

-Jack Mulvaney

On behalf of FERM

Links to Recording of Open House and Documents for 5C Record Merge

Thank you everyone who attended the recent 5C Bib Merge Working Group Open House. As a community, we have agreed to go forward with these recommendations in the presentation slides. If you have comments about these decisions, please contact us via our Slack channel.

Below are links to recordings and documents.

Reminder: 5C Bib Merge Open House 7/17

Reminder: Everyone is Welcome to the Open House

The Record Merge Working Group invites you to an open house on July 17, 2020. The purpose of this open house is to update the 5C community on the working group’s activities and present decisions made thus far by the working group for comment and review by the community. environment.

Details:

  • Day: Friday, July 17, 2020
  • Time: 1:00 -2:30 pm
  • Zoom URL
  • Presentation
  • Meeting Recording will be shared afterwards

Agenda:

  • Introduction & Welcome
  • Review of Bib Merge Working Documents
  • Anti-oppressive additions to the Guidelines
  • Discussions
    • OCLC Numbers
    • Remove Notes with $5 of DLC
    • Decoupling Bibliographic records with holdings in both general and special collections
    • Clean-up projects. Where are we?

Working Draft Documentation:

The following are the working documents of the working group.

5c Bib Merge Working Group Open House – Save the Date

The Record Merge Working Group invites you to an open house on June 17, 2020. The purpose of this open house is to update the 5C community on the working group’s activities and present decisions made thus far by the working group for comment and review by the community. This open house is open to everyone. We encourage you to join us in particular those who have a stake in our future shared bibliographic environment.

Details:

  • Day: Friday, July 17, 2020
  • Time: 1:00 -2:30 pm
  • Zoom URL

Tentative Agenda: A presentation will be shared sooner to the date.

      • Introduction & Welcome
      • Review of Record Merge Recommendations of What is in Scope and Relationship to Migration
      • Changes to our Dedup Profile
      • Discussions
        • OCLC Numbers
        • Decoupling Bibliographic records with holdings in both general and special collections
        • Clean-up projects. Where are we?

Working Draft Documentation:

Recording Available for the 5C Bib Merge Open House

The 5C Bib Merge Working Group Open House recording and chat script are now available. Below you will find those links along with links shared during the discussion.

We are asking for help with reviewing note fields. Some of the reports for the 5XX have to be downloaded. If you experience issues, contact the working group. Please note that it is not necessary to use a $5 for every single note field. This only pertains to a note MARC tag that allows a subfield 5 and where the information needs to be associated to a particular resource and institution. In contrast, we are asking that institutions set aside the use of local fields 9XX, X9X, XX9. The exceptions are 019 for the old OCLC number and 099 for local call number. For more guidance on these and other fields, see our Shared Bib guidelines. If you have questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact the working group via Slack or email.