Earlier this month, the International Journal of Librarianship published a special issue on the FOLIO project.  Index Data’s own Mike Tayor wrote the feature article on Modularity in FOLIO: Principles, Techniques, and Tools.  Mike worked on the FOLIO project from its inception, and in this article he describes the purpose behind the early architectural decisions.  What makes FOLIO so exciting is its design that anticipates a marketplace of apps on the platform.  With its focus on well-defined, versioned APIs between modules, individual teams create apps on the platform that both interoperate with each other and guard against inadvertent data corruption.  The design choices are not without consequences, though, and Mike’s close-up and honest analysis of the challenges and the potential solutions give an in-depth picture of where FOLIO is going.

In addition to Mike’s article, the issue also includes these articles about the FOLIO project:

• Cornell Library FOLIO Case Study: how Cornell University came to the decision to back the FOLIO project, its support of the design and development process, and its implementation of the platform.
• The Five College Consortium & FOLIO eResource Management: five academic libraries that had very different electronic resource management workflows come together to implement a shared installation of FOLIO ERM apps and along the way contribute user experience improvements to FOLIO.
• Lessons Learned about FOLIO’s APIs: an exploration of the FOLIO application programming interfaces to migrate data from a previous system and to implement workflows that were not possible in previous systems
• FOLIO and Smart Libraries: Meeting the Future Needs of Chinese Libraries: an article from a vividly novel viewpoint that incorporates a recent-adopter view of the FOLIO platform, apps, and community with a perspective of how FOLIO’s openness fits into the “smart libraries” concept of integration and flexibility.
• How is FOLIO Different from Its Predecessors?: a commentary on how FOLIO answers the needs of librarians and libraries as well as why now is a good time to get involved with the project.