I've been asked "why do you write software?" a lot in my career, and particularly in my position here as Director of Scholarly Technology at GW Libraries, where we do write a lot of software. For me, the answer is simple, and it's the same answer I've always given, since I first went to library school: it is the work of a librarian to write software. This has always seemed natural and clear to me, but I understand that it's not obvious to everyone, especially in a broader organizational context.
So why is it important to have staff at a research library with appropriate skills and experience tasked with writing software?
First, navigating through the many information resources we provide -- both online and on our shelves -- isn't easy. GW Libraries, like many research libraries, provides access to hundreds of online databases, thousands of online journals, and millions of physical items. To help people find what they need quickly, we have to offer the clearest possible paths for everyone to navigate for themselves. Recently we wrote a software application that provides a new quick search box on our site at http://library.gwu.edu/ that searches a wide range of sources at once, and more importantly, it searches a range of types of sources at once. This helps anyone searching our site to make two quick choices: what kind of resource they're looking for, and where to go within that category of resources to dig deeper. This isn't a new idea - many of our peer institutions offer similar services, and we credit NCSU Libraries with pioneering this concept. But all of our libraries subscribe to different sources, and to put them all together in a way that made the most sense for GWU, we wrote our own software. Over time, the sources themselves will change, but now we have the ability to adapt our application to new content over time without having to sacrifice the now-improved experience of finding information through GW Libraries.
The Special Collections Research Center’s rare and specialized books collections contain many treasures. The SCRC is excited to share some of their unique print materials in anticipation of the release of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” this week: a set of first edition printings of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy! Tolkien published The Lord of the Rings in three volumes over the course of a year from 1954 to 1955, as a sequel to his children's fantasy novel The Hobbit, published in 1937. All three books are bound in red cloth with gold stamping on the spines, and grey dust jackets printed in red, black and gold. Each volume contains a foldout map of Tolkien’s rendition of Middle Earth. Part one, The Fellowship of the Rings, also contains a handwritten note from Tolkien to E. Rasdall, Esq., dated March 21, 1956, tucked into the dust jacket! It reads:
As you would expect, peak use occurs around mid-term and final exam periods. I generated a few detailed reports from the online reservation system. The reports show that:
The Library has recently acquired The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century, a database comprised of numerous collections of primary source materials, now digitized and made available through a single interface. With this resource, researchers may study both well-known and unheralded events of a major American social movement from the perspectives of those who participated in them. The database is organized into two modules: “Federal Government Records” and “Organizational Records and Personal Papers, Part 1.”
