Mosaic in Minutes Workflow Highlight: FOLIO Library Perspective

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What does an efficient acquisitions workflow look like from a FOLIO library’s point of view? In this video, Stephanie Caselli from Cairn University shares why close integration between Mosaic and FOLIO matters, how real library feedback shaped development, and where real time data flow supports flexibility, speed, and confidence in daily work. 

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Mosaic in Minutes Workflow Highlight: FOLIO Library Perspective

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I'm Stephanie Kaceli. I'm from Cairn University, and just a wee bit about us: we are an extremely small private university. I think we all can relate to the fact that every day we're being asked to do more with lesser, and so it's all about efficiency. But in all of that, we're very committed to perpetual access - print and E - as well as caring for our robust e-collection. We've been FOLIO since June 2022, and we actually right after that, we went up with our GOBI integrations, and they've been an important part of who we are for a very long time. So from selecting, ordering, updating holdings and invoice, we have this very tight integration with FOLIO at the moment with our GOBI. And a snapshot of Cairn's involvement. It really wasn't that long ago. It was May 2025 at the EBSCO User Group, and Bethany was there presenting what's going on with Mosaic and the future with FOLIO. And of course, all of us FOLIO libraries wanted to know when are we going to get our FOLIO integration? And she asked if anyone was interested to to see her. So a little bit after that, I saw her across the room and I made a beeline. And most people know to run the other way. She didn't, and I just said I wanted to be part of this. And on July 14th, a group of us just came together, and between Michelle and Bethany and Mary Kay and Dennis, just such an amazing team that are doing very, very good work. And we started up on August 28th with phase one with Sunflower and worked through stuff, and then phase two started around October 31st. And really since August it has been this sprint of improvements and watching this grow and really be something viable that I cannot wait for Sunflower to be available for us FOLIO libraries. And even today there is work as we speak. As we're doing this, there are people working on making this even a better and tighter solution. So it's that iterative work that I've witnessed, and it's the library workflow. Even at the EBSCO User Group, it was all about hearing from the libraries. It's not, Mosaic doesn't exist just to be something pretty and look nice. It's here for us, for our workflows. And that's what matters. And the improvements, they just keep coming. I'm not sure if Bethany mentioned this, but one of the really neat things is fields are no longer just alphabetical. Starting this month, we were able to sort them by our workflow. So now it's order template, fund, expense class, etc.. I mean, the sky's the limit. It's what works in your workflow. Then that can be updated. Not going to spend a ton of time here, but really this screen is just to show this is our workflow in Mosaic. It's the workflow that works for us a little, tweaked a wee bit because in GOBI, you know, you have to do things a certain way, but now we can kind of think and dream and change things around if we so choose. So as I'm kicking the tires and getting to play with Mosaic and FOLIO together, it's been a neat opportunity. And the things that I've really noticed and it all goes back to efficiency, the ability to have a quick response time, not just in terms of results, but just how many clicks, how many being efficient with our work and our time that way. The ease of access and then also just the ease of locating our information once we've placed an order or even before placing an order. I think all of that, I've really kind of put the benefits of Mosaic in those three types of areas. And we're going to look at one I was thinking about this at one point. Okay. How many clicks does it take to get to an invoice, let's say in GOBI. It's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. That's quicker than any GOBI invoice ever comes up in our browser window, right? And there's a little bit of information that we get. We have the POL and you can see that it's an unlimited user if you know what you're looking at. But that's kind of it. And it takes a while just to get to that. And then you download it and print it, yay. So Mr. Owl, how many licks or, well, really how many clicks does it take to get to an invoice in Mosaic? It's one, two, three. And when you click on that, it actually takes more clicks to get to the invoice here than it does in Mosaic. So here it is, the Mosaic invoice. You don't just see the POL number, but you see the access model clearly labeled. You have your expense, your fund, your order number. It's all here. I greatly appreciate this invoice and the ease of getting to it. So it's that tight integration, though, between Mosaic and FOLIO that I really appreciate. And I feel like I'm going to be repeating Bethany a lot because it's these real time APIs that are going both directions that have really seen these updates and saving of time, and then being able to be me controlled rather than ticket controlled or email controlled. That's a really big thing. Those order templates, it's sky’s the limits in terms of what you can do with those and the import profiles that you can do, and the power of the POL is a really real thing and being able to use that. And how many things that you can do, as well as the EDI invoicing and the choices that you can make. There's no way to get to a bad choice. You really, there's so many opportunities to do good work here. One of the things we talked about was the ability of the funds, this happening in real time. I don't know about you, but there's many times where I'm like, oh, I would like to add that fund. That would make my life a lot easier and being able to track that. But then you start thinking about all that you need to do to get that change to happen. And now I can go into FOLIO, I can add a fund for our EDD program, as well as an expense class for the educational leadership side of that. And then in Mosaic real time, it's coming up as the expense class and the fund is right there. So additionally it's not just being able to, you know, you've not as many clicks. It's a lot more efficient. It's also efficient getting to the information I find. And so it's the URL that is coming in the emails with your fulfilled order within an hour or two. Sometimes much quicker, JSTOR comes lickety split, and you get these URLs and you get it in the email. And now I can open up that email and I can go, oh, that was a book for so-and-so. I can just forward that over to that person and I've closed my loop. And that's a really great way of being able to get them access quick and not have to wait for a day or for whenever it takes for your EDS to start propagating. And then also, just if you don't want to leave Mosaic, you don't have to. Just going into Mosaic via the order activity, you can go ahead and copy that and paste it wherever it needs to go, which is very helpful. And then finally I like to show the MARC edit view. So in MARC edit you can, I have a very barebones MARC edit or MARC record and I haven't really added too much in there. But you can take your 856 field and when you map it properly in your data import profiles, you actually can bring this, I brought this into our item record. So it's the URL, the link text, so when somebody is looking for this in our catalog, they'll be able to just link and go out to the e-book. And then this is just the profile right here that I mapped it to. And you can kind of do it your way and it works well. So all of that to say we're so excited about Mosaic. We are still in GOBI a little bit mainly because of print books, but as we all know, we can also click the GOBI button there. The approval plans and the slip searching, cannot wait for that to come. And Bethany did show how you can do the multiple ISBN search in Mosaic, and it works well, but it's not as robust as the GOBI option, and I keep testing it. And so what we're looking forward to obviously in Mosaic is the Sunflower release so we can get that API and get going. And then I also listed here the customized order of fields, because I think it's really important to remember that this, Mosaic and FOLIO, all of it together, it's not going to ever stop improving. That's kind of the beauty of these products. And so to, you know, always mark your wins out, I think is really important.

Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.