Family Man Librarian

Yesterday Dan (my library director), Matt (one of the students with whom I work), and I went to Indy to meet with some other libraries within our consortium, PALNI, to demonstrate our periodical management system, which we call TPAS (Taylor Periodical Administration System). I have to admit to quite a bit of nervousness about the whole thing, for a number of reasons. Other libraries represented in the meeting included DePauw, Butler, Concordia, and the University of Indianapolis. There were also folks from INCOLSA in attendance. The meeting went much better than I ever expected. I am really pleased at the level of interest in and appreciation for the software we’ve spent so much time developing locally. There is a real chance that other libraries will implement it and then we can all benefit from not only cooperative use, but also cooperative development of this alternative to a vendor supplied system. I believe quite strongly in the benefits of open source and the positive reaction from other libraries to TPAS gives us the impetus we needed to further develop it to a point where we can make the software freely available as open source via SourceForge.