5C Bibliographic Merge Working Group

The Five Colleges invested in the current integrated library system, Ex Libris’s Aleph, in 2005. It is now 14 years later and Aleph is showing its age. Though improvements continue, it is clear Aleph lacks crucial features. As a result of analyses and discussions on how to proceed, in 2018 the Five Colleges selected FOLIO as a beta partner with EBSCO and the FOLIO Implementation Team (FIT) was created. FIT decided to move to a single tenant system for FOLIO, meaning there will be one instance. Currently, there exist overlaps between bibliographic records reflecting what each of the institutions in the Five Colleges has acquired over the years. This working group was created to analyze and provide recommendations on the complex issue of merging records for the move to our new library service platform FOLIO. This working group was often referred to as Bib Merge, Record Merge, or RMWG.