Family Man Librarian

When I got back from my meeting in Indianapolis late this afternoon I was able to talk with Paul, a student who has worked for me for a couple of years and who graduated this past weekend from Taylor. He and the third student who works for me, Ashley, were the ones who got engaged last week. Paul is finishing up a long-term project to completely revamp the Java-based Interlibrary Loan (ILL) form that we’ve been using at my library for a couple of years. Our goal was to make it more functional as well as user-friendly. The original form was called ILL Wizard and was developed by a student at Olivet Nazarene University’s Benner Library along with a good friend and colleague of mine, Craighton Hippenhammer. Craighton made ILL Wizard freely available as open source and he and I have talked back and forth about it and what we’d like to change. I’m a few days away from making our own customized version of this original form available via SourceForge and hope to announce it on www.oss4lib.org as well. I’ve been a big proponent of open source for a while. This project is particularly gratifying because it will be the first time my library and institution will contribute (hopefully more broadly useful) software to the larger library community via open source.

Paul has done great work on this and I am excited to see this project near completion. Oh and by the way, Paul is currently looking for a job so if anyone reads this posting and has need of a good IT-system-analyst kind of employee who has library experience, please contact me so that I can put you in touch with Paul. He needs a job and he’d be a great addition to your staff!