In the September 2016 Amigos online conference Ken Chad presented a compelling case for an industry in disruptive motion. In his presentation Ken references a 2014 Wired blog noting that “market upstarts are displacing market leaders faster than ever before as entire industries transform.” Ken goes on to look at the Platform Revolution (2016), a compelling book that speaks to the success of companies like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon and others. The reason for success? These businesses are built on platforms.
The question now at hand is one of disruption in the library industry. Are libraries ripe for fundamental change that will bring about a new category in library technology? And how would this change in fact look like? What is clear is that library technology has traditionally centered on monolithic systems that lack some of the key platform attributes that Ken points out underlie success: the ability to create value for all participants, leveraging resources they don’t own in order to grow faster, and changing the focus from traditionally inward to outward. The key point may well be that a platform derives its value from the community. In concrete terms this means that no single product dominates the technology environment. Instead, a loosely coupled ecosystem of applications arises, built on the platform, to deliver ever-increasing value to the community – by many community participants.
This presentation will look at FOLIO, a community project that looks to fundamentally change how library software is built and provisioned. The presenter will discuss how in fact FOLIO goes beyond the Integrated Library System (ILS) to give way to a new paradigm in which a multitude of applications, built on top of a platform by multiple service providers, may in fact deliver new services to users. The presenter will look at the practical manifestations that are well underway: strong community, modular architecture, and a marketplace of applications and services.
