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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 It has been superseded at that institution by a commercial service.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