I’m a library systems administrator at an academic research library. Before that, I was a literature professor. People sometimes find that combination surprising, but the more time I spend in both worlds, the more coherent it seems: both are fundamentally about organizing knowledge and making it findable. The methods are just very different.
On the technical side, my work lives at the intersection of library systems (Alma, Primo, ILLiad), Linux infrastructure, and the scripting and tooling that holds it all together. I spend a lot of time in terminals, writing Python and Go, debugging integrations between systems that were never quite designed to talk to each other, and thinking about why library infrastructure is so chronically under-documented.
That last part is more or less why this blog exists. There’s good writing about library technology at the policy and trends level, and there’s good technical documentation for individual systems. What’s harder to find is practitioner-level writing that treats library infrastructure as a serious engineering problem while also caring about what it’s actually for. That’s the gap I’m trying to write into.
Expect posts about resource sharing workflows, discovery systems, automation, Linux, Python, Go, the occasional deep dive into a protocol nobody talks about, and probably some detours into the history of cataloging or the nineteenth-century novel. The connections are more direct than they sound.