The electronic catalogs for my nearby public libraries are pretty basic. They are the same boring Horizon Information Portal websites that provide the basics but sifting through the results is clumsy. And searching another library at the same time? Forget it.

Enter WorldCat. Searching a library is, dare I say it, fun again! Everyone can add reviews to library items ala Amazon, it automatically shows you nearby libraries that have the item using guesstimated location based on your IP, and they make money by providing links to Amazon if you’re too lazy to go get the book from a library yourself. Very well done… I’m jealous.

I still wish I could find my library search engine that I made back at UIUC in 1994. It was the capstone project for, of all things, CS411 Database Systems. The professor was dating/engaged/married to Eric Bina who was the co-creator of Mosaic with Marc Andreessen. And so apparently she liked the idea of making her databases class build a web application. I was fine with it, really, because Mosaic was pretty cool, although I found myself always keeping 2 windows open and dragging links from one to the other so I wouldn’t lose my place while I wandered about. Kind of a kludgy coping mechanism before the era of tabbed browsing.

I came up with the idea for my team of 3 to build a web interface to the UIUC library system, which was a mainframe beast, maybe 3270 but I’m not sure. Luckily one of the guys on my team had build the TCPSETUP program for Doom, so he was good at making socket programs and so he built a library for talking to the mainframe. I built out the perl-based webapp which took care of sessions, form-processing, calling the library to talk to the mainframe, rendering the search results, etc. The other guy, um, didn’t do anything.

Even though I didn’t have a name for it (usability) I worked hard to make the webapp easy, even fun, to use. You typed in a search by author or title and would get back a list of results all nicely lined up with information about each match. Click on a book to see more details, and best of all, get a form where you could put in your school ID and the library would send the book to your dorm room! For real!

Every team presented their final projects during the last week of class. Other teams had built basically useless apps, all were clunky, didn’t make sense, whatever. We presented ours to applause, actually, but apparently our professor was not impressed. “It looks too easy”, she said. That was the goddamn point! The back-end work to screenscrape multiple greenscreens for every page view was nutso stuff, and yes, the front end looked smooth & clean. She gave us a B. And that was when I knew that all those people who had told me that “grad school was when you start doing real work, no more theory crap like undergrad classes” were out of their minds. I had worked my ass off to build something real, and got a frakkin’ B for my troubles.

Postscript – a few weeks after this class ended, the webmaster for UIUC heard about my library webapp and asked if she could install it on the library website. It became the official library web search engine running at UIUC for the next several years. Yeah, that sounds like B-level work to me… Adios, grad school!