UA Libraries Wins National Grant to Develop Innovative Technology

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The University of Alabama Libraries was selected as one of four academic libraries nationwide to receive a total of $100,000 in EBSCO FOLIO Innovation Challenge grants.

EBSCO Information Services awarded the yearlong grant to libraries that presented plans to use the money to develop innovative technology that addresses a myriad of challenges commonly faced by academic libraries.

Andrew Nagy, EBSCO information services director of SaaS Innovation, said the winning universities met the project’s criteria to deliver interesting features that benefit library users and that complete or augment the core functionality of FOLIO.

FOLIO is an initiative created in 2016 that brings libraries and service providers together to reshape the future of libraries and develop new technologies, according to its website.

“We created the EBSCO FOLIO Innovation Challenge to do just that, challenge universities to solve the problems they and other institutions face and bring those solutions to the FOLIO community, which has come together around creating a future of libraries that is open,” Nagy said.

Using the open-source services platform that FOLIO provides, UA Libraries’ development team plans to use the grant money to create data collection, reporting and analysis tools, which will build upon the successes UA Libraries has had in building custom reporting solutions.

“We are excited to have this opportunity to work with EBSCO and the FOLIO project by helping bring data reporting to the forefront of the FOLIO interface,” said Steven Turner, web technologies and development manager for UA Libraries.

“We feel that library system data, easy access to that data and understandable reporting are important in terms of efficient decision-making, and important to the success of the FOLIO project.”

Other grant winners are the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, John Hopkins University and Lehigh University.