Ron Burns from EBSCO was up next to talk about what EBSCO is doing with their Open Source library platform.
Ron started off with a few facts about EBSCO
- EBSCO is not an ILS vendor
- 60+ ILS partnerships
- Support Koha and were a board member of OLE
Then he talked about the current proprietary Library Service Platforms, and likened them to an old set of anitque drawers. And also touched on how they are monoliths and with the bundling of discovery .. leads to lock in. When you factor in the consolidation, there is a real lack of choice for libraries.
The new FOSS LSP should be modular and modern. Ron reminded us that open source drives innovation, so of course they should build with open source.
Folio (the new LSP) is built with a focus on
- Open Source
- Community
- Modern
- Modular
- Support
They decided to choose the Apache 2 License and copyright transfer to the Open Library Foundation. The community at this point is Kuali OLE, some libraries, Index Data, industry partners, EBSCO.
The architecture will look someting like
- System Layer
- API layer
- Apps
- UI Toolkit
He did a really good job of a high level view of what it might look like. If you look up the presentation online you will get a much better idea than I can impart.
Where does Koha fit? The Koha community can decide that.
Timeline
- Development now
- Mid 2016 code on github
- 2017 first base platform release, and apps released
- 2018 marketplace
