Full article in French here: Dépêche AEF n541931

Translated excerpts:

…Grégory Miura, Director of Common Service Documentation at Montaigne University, Bordeaux, explained that French institutions “might now have to make a tough decision between embracing a proprietary technology that would need to guarantee both openness and interoperability, or joining the open source community” …

…The Folio announcement raises the question of strategic positioning in relation to the shared ILS market. This is especially true given that this new collaboration, predominantly North American so far, is open to all public and private institutions that wish to participate, regardless of their size or country of origin…

…According to Miura, the time for change has definitely come: “the last time that French universities were massively re-automated was between 1995 and 2000”, when the SUDOC catalog was implemented. Today existing systems mostly date back to this time and are no longer appropriate for the current organization of work or for the new requirements for electronic documentation description and management…

…Miura said that the point of Folio should not be about: “integrating an entire international system as is coming from the United States”  in the information system of an institution. For this reason, he insists that French institutions should play an active role in the development of this new service platform not only in order to support an international “vision” based on the protocols, standards and international formats that are “common foundations for the library operations,” but also to maintain vigilance on local specificities”…

Notes:

AEF is an independent and specialized French press agency

The SUDOC catalog is a collection featuring over 10 million bibliographic records (monographs, theses, periodicals series and other types of documents)