I was involved in developing MARC.pm, the predecessor to the MARC::Record
module now in wide use.

In my prior employment, I wrote a PHP/PostgreSQL/Apache application that
served up a listing of our electronic journals, searchable by title
keyword, range of starting letters, and by a home-grown set of subjects
comprising roughly two dozen terms.  It has been superseded at that
institution by a commercial service.

Most of the coding I have done has been for behind-the-scenes data
harvesting and munging--what I think of as utility programming.  Much of
it resulted in single-use utilities that were quite specific to data and
context.  I have pretty much always used open-source tools in my work.

In my present position (systems analyst, School of Health Information
Sciences at the University of Texas--Houston), I am using Python to do
automated analysis of full-text resources harvested from the web, with
an eye to assigning terms from a home-grown controlled vocabulary.
Sadly, I'm a Linux exile in a Windows world, so I'm running ActiveState
Python on XP, loading the results into MS SQL Server.  Cygwin makes life
bearable :)

Roy Tennant made an important observation when he noted that librarians
should have some knowledge of programming if only to have a grasp of the
ease or difficulty of a particular programming task.  We all know how
nice it is when the folks we program for have a clue about this matter!

Chuck Bearden