[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Late Bloomer

[Heidi (Faculty) Johnson]

Hello!
The snow is almost gone and tulips are taking the chance to emerge here
in northern Minnesota, and I have finally worked up the courage to reply
to Brad LaJeunesse's request for listserv participants to identify
themselves. My name is Heidi Johnson, and I am a librarian at The
College of St. Scholastica. I mainly work with students at the reference
desk and do class presentations on library resources; however, I am also
earning my second master's degree in Computer Information Systems. One
way that these two skill sets intersect is with the OPAC, and I have
been interested for awhile with how the OPAC can interact more
effectively with patrons.

In addition, Minnesota colleges and universities have been migrating to
Aleph, an Ex Libris product, to much disappointment. The final straw
came several weeks ago when they tweaked adjacent phrase searching to
include "!0" between terms (for example to search for wild rice together
as a phrase, the search string would be wild!0rice - now try teaching
that to a group of freshman! :) Needless to say, PINES is an absolute
dream, and I have been showing it off every chance I get.

At any rate, the stars aligned for my master's thesis, and I have been
earnestly studying everything I can about open source and advanced
database techniques and planning how we might be able to actually adopt
Evergreen here at our college. My fellow librarians, library director,
master's advisor, and other groups on campus have shown me much
encouragement and willingness to help out as time and ability allow. 

In short, I have really enjoyed reading the listserv comments and
learning from them. I am hoping to contribute in whatever way I can. So
far (as required of me for my thesis), I have been very thorough in
project management and systems analysis and depending on how far we are
able to go, I think other interested libraries could adopt these
documents and work off of them for their own implementations.

Finally, I am planning a trip to Georgia this summer and would really
appreciate the chance to meet with people on this project as well as
interview staff and patrons at a public library. Does anyone know how I
might be able to arrange this? Thank you very much for any help.

Sincerely,
Heidi Johnson
Assistant Professor
Librarian
The College of St. Scholastica
hjohnso2 at css.edu 
(218) 723-6488