Page 134 - Journal of Library Science in China 2020 Vol.46

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Extended English abstracts of articles published in the Chinese edition of Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.46, 2020 133

same API specification, and the intercommunication between apps, other business systems and
apps is governed by rules. FOLIO openness solves the island of data among library applications.
FOLIO fully meets the library’s desire for software modularity and functional autonomy through
business module modularization. Librarians, software companies, project managers and others
can find their own way of communication and obtain necessary information, especially Chinese
libraries may affect the development direction of software. Finally, this paper introduces that
the library has used several open source software whose reliability has been verified. The paper
expects FOLIO to be one of the new models and directions of the next generation library service
platform.

Technology selection and operation mode of FOLIO

〇a*
GUO Limin〇 & ZHANG Lei
FOLIO, as a first open source project of the third-generation library service platform, provides a
new modular application environment, which is jointly constructed by libraries, developers and
service providers. The architecture design of its workflow can not only well support the existing
business but also flexibly support the unknown services that may happen in the future of the
library. The purpose of this paper is to explore the FOLIO open source library service platform with
its advanced technical architecture and how domestic libraries get involved in FOLIO ecosystem.
In this paper, combined with microservices and FOLIO, we introduce the new ideas brought by
microservices—“Organized around Business Capabilities” and “Products not Projects” and explain
what they are. And then we give an overview of the FOLIO platform’s history, organizational and
system architecture. It was organized by OLE and funded by EBSCO and combined librarians,
developers and vendors. We show the 4 layers of FOLIO system architecture and do some
performance test comparison between Vert.x and Spring framework under high concurrency. The
results show that FOLIO’s technology selection has a high-performance asynchronous network that
library can support large-scale applications. After that, we explain why FOLIO chose PostgreSQL
by choosing JSON data format to store dynamic data structures without changing the database
structure. The paper introduces FOLIO community organization and business model. In FOLIO
community, there are 3 roles—Tech Council, Product Council and Special Interest Groups，and
the paper shows how community works and how FOLIO is driven by community. Considering
the sustainable development of FOLIO, the paper also considered the business model. We think
there are two business models: one is that the core is open source and the extension is charge, and
the other is providing SaaS platform support. From the above, we think there are 2 ways for the
domestic libraries to get involved in FOLIO ecosystem. The first is to build a FOLIO Chinese

∗ Correspondence should be addressed to GUO Limin, Email: lmguo@libnet.sh.cn, ORCID: 0000-0002-8138-2762.