The Five College Consortium Adopts FOLIO Electronic Resources Management

The Five College Consortium, as part of its FOLIO beta partnership with EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO), has become the first consortia to implement Electronic Resources Management (ERM). The consortium includes the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith colleges.

“The Five College Consortium provides a unique environment for testing FOLIO as we use a shared catalogue collection among member institutions,” says Steve Bischof, associate dean for library technology at UMass Amherst, and chair of the Five College FOLIO implementation team. “Our testing ranged from filling the needs of UMass Amherst, a large research university, to those of smaller institutions with multiple collections, like Smith College. Adopting the ERM is the first step, and we expect to fully implement FOLIO in 2021.”

“The work accomplished by the FOLIO ERM team has been transformative, even in the midst of tremendous change at each of their home institutions due to the pandemic,” says Simon Neame, dean of Libraries at UMass Amherst, and chair, Five College Librarians Council. “They’ve demonstrated that the future of libraries truly is open—and collaborative—which will be of great benefit to all of our patrons.”

Members of the FOLIO ERM Working Group (FERM) include: Paul Trumble of Amherst College, Amedeo DeCara and Jen Bolmarcich of Hampshire College, Sara Colglazier of Mount Holyoke College, Jenna Lanterman of Smith College, and Jack Mulvaney (Lead of FERM) of UMass Amherst. FIT Liaisons are Kathleen Berry (Head, Information Resources Management) at UMass and Janet Ewing (Associate Director of Research and Instructional Support) at Mount Holyoke. The Five College Library Systems Coordinator is Aaron Neslin.

FERM was formed in May of 2020, and has been charged with reaching consensus on issues related to data conversion, data management, workflows, policies, and procedures for electronic resource management within the Five Colleges. Since October 2020, they have been the primary focus of the Five College FOLIO migration and were able to advocate for the needs of the consortium to the FOLIO development community, with our partners at EBSCO, and with colleagues across the consortium in order to configure, migrate and adopt FOLIO in August 2020.

In 2018, the Five College Consortium announced a FOLIO beta partnership with EBSCO, which allowed the institutions to contribute to the development of the library services platform and test FOLIO in large, real-world environments and multiple institutional scenarios.

“This partnership offered the FOLIO community and EBSCO the opportunity to address issues library staff confront within and across a consortium,” says EBSCO FOLIO Consulting Services Manager Anya Arnold. “For ERM functionally to work, EBSCO teams worked with the Five College librarians ensuring that each library can still mange unique and independent electronic collections in a shared environment.”