Hi John:

On Fri, Dec 12, 2003 at 05:40:53PM -0800, John Durno wrote:
> What programming-type projects have you undertaken that really had some
> benefit in that context?

I guess the project I've had most success with is MARC/Perl [1] which is
a set of Perl modules for working with MARC data.  The project started when
I was at Old Dominion University in 1999, and I needed a way to create
MARC records from TEI [2] records, so we could get records in our online
catalog for electronic texts at the University of Virginia.  The great thing
about the MARC/Perl project is that early on the perl4lib [3] list was started
up, which allowed like minded developers to connect and collaborate. There
s a healthy list of MARC/Perl users on the website.  In fact, at my current
job [4], we've used MARC/Perl extensively to offer an online collection
analysis tool called TitleWise.  TitleWise is a free service for school
libraries, which allows them to export the collection metadata (as MARC), and
which then presents a series of interactive reports on the web, and a PDF (
for the principal :) to help librarians (and more often teachers) select and
weed materials from their collections.

As far as libraries go, I've also developed Net::OAI::Harvester [5] for
interacting with OAI-PMH [6] repositories.  This is by no means the only Perl
module for doing this, but it has some interesting features and has been
used recently by the Max Planck Society [7], Los Alamos National Laboratory [8],
and the Universitat de València [9].

> (Alternatively, what projects would you like to undertake if the time and/or
> skills were available?)

Ahh, time :) I've enjoyed working on software components as open source
projects, and would really like to find the time to learn more about
the XML based NCIP circulation protocol, and perhaps put together a component
that could be used in larger applications or utilities [10].  I've also
daydreamed about developing a personal library manager, that would allow
you to easily manage your own private library, and allow you to share reviews,
currently reading lists with peers.  As a byproduct you could see what your
peers were currently reading, and what they have that you might want to borrow.

//Ed

[1]  http://marcpm.sf.net
[2]  http://www.tei-c.org/
[3]  http://perl4lib.perl.org
[4]  http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Net::OAI::Harvester
[5]  http://www.open-archives.org
[6]  http://edoc.mpg.de/
[8]  http://www.uv.es
[9]  http://www.lanl.gov
[10] http://www.niso.org/committees/committee_at.html