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When Emma Boettcher returned to her job as a librarian at the University of Chicago after appearing on Jeopardy, her colleagues brought in a cake decorated like the iconic game show’s board to celebrate.
The 27-year-old librarian had unseated James Holzhauer, one of the highest-grossing Jeopardy contestants of all time, and won nearly $100,000. And as a result, she had become a celebrity, complete with an origin story that included writing her graduate thesis about analyzing Jeopardy clues for patterns.
Now it was time to get back to her day job, part of which involves helping build an open-source library services platform that manages physical and digital collections—which could help future researchers, whether they’re preparing for their own Jeopardy bid or more serious scholarship.
The project is called FOLIO, and it’s an international effort to build open-source, “next-generation” software to handle the back-end work of organizing library collections, like helping patrons check out books and managing digital holdings. Boettcher spends about half of her job at the University of Chicago as a product manager for a piece of the project, and the rest of her time as a user experience librarian at the university.
FOLIO has been in the works since 2015, and it has been quietly growing with the help of at least a dozen college and university libraries. While much of its functions are in the category of “boring but important”—like keeping track of the millions of books a place like the University of Chicago library owns—the software aims to be the central nervous system for major libraries around the world.
