There is a community developed platform, which pays attention to the above detailed aspects. The platform is called FOLIO, “The Future of Libraries is Open”. This platform with its strict communication rules accepted and obeyed by the developers / contributors can ensure, that individually developed modules can communicate with each other. The technical heart of this is OKAPI, an API gateway that manages communication and separation between apps and different tenants (installations) of the platform. OKAPI is a message bus, the communication channel. The approach is based on microservices: the smallest possible units interconnected in a meaningful context. In this the applications are language agnostic, applications can be written in any programming language – which again provides the freedom of choice for the developer community. The apps can be open source, can be licensed, software developer companies can integrate their products. The cooperation in FOLIO is based on the work sharing of librarians, functionalists, strategists, service providers and developers, and enriched by active users.

The Hungarian National Library has signed a cooperation agreement with FOLIO in 2016. The first press release of FOLIO already announces a broad range of cooperation partners, among them our library. Since then, our library is an active member of the community, and with our requirements we aim to influence the scope of functionality and the openness of the designed system.  We have organized early 2017 a FOLIO day in our library and invited all Hungarian libraries to learn more about this revolutionary approach. We have sent invitation to the neighboring countries as well, and have recorded the presentations, which are available on our website.