[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] introducing ourselves

[John Clark]

Great idea Paul,

  I'm John Clark, currently the entire staff of the Hartland Public Library in Hartland, Maine. We were the first library in Maine to use open source (we contracted with Liblime 2 1/2 years ago to set us up on Koha), and subsequently, several of the librarians in our Tri-County Librarian Group (Penobscot, Piscataquis and Somerset) were envious of what my system could do v.s. what theirs could. as a result, three of us worked together in June 2008 and wrote a grant which Stephen and Tabitha king funded to create an open source consortium with an eventual goal of opening it up to other libraries in the area. After looking at Koha and not getting very much interest from a company which shall not be named, we started looking at Evergreen and eventually opened negotiations with the folks at NELINET to set us up and host the server. We are in process of doing so to create a consortium of 7 rural public libraries and two schools. I'm software agnostic as far as one or the other of the OS systems are concerned, but feel that going forward, Evergreen has far more potential to do for Maine libraries what it has for Georgia.

   As for background and experience, I spent 27 years working at the larger of our two psychiatric hospitals, starting at the bottom after graduation from college and moving up to my level of incompetence before realizing that I had absolutely no business supervising people. At that point, I became head of the adult education program there and earned a masters in the field. A few years later, the librarian retired and I offered to modernize the patient and health science libraries (having no clue how to do so), Anyhow, I got the job and in 1994 went back to school, earning an MLIS from the U. of South Carolina's distance program. Since graduating in 1997, I've been head librarian in Boothbay Harbor where I brought the library into Minerva, a public/academic library consortium running Innovative's Millennium. After 5 years, I moved to the Maine State Library as their library systems specialist and spent 4 years setting up new libraries as well as trouble-shooting and training staff in the Minerva consortium. In the course of doing that, I created a fair amount of simplified documentation for cataloging, simple fixes, list creation and circulation because the iii manual was such a bear.
   When two of us had gone from handling 46 libraries to just under 100, I was toast and decided to simplify things by taking my present job which is 2 blocks from home and 34 hours (well that's what I get paid for anyhow) a week. I still handle a fair amount of trouble-shooting for iii libraries in Minerva and another consortium-Solar, so I don't lose my skills.  I also write professionally both in the library world as well as YA Fantasy, short fiction and magazine articles, so like Paul, I enjoy writing.

Regards,
John Clark

John R. Clark IV, M.ED, MLIS-Librarian/Wizard, Hartland, Maine
Specializing in whale herding and Klaxon tuning at competitive rates.
http://sennebec.livejournal.com/ 
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