My other realities

As a writer/librarian/wizard, blogging is a natural outlet and is generally a barometer of my internal well-being. Most of my entries can be found on livejournal http://sennebec.livejournal.com/ because that's where I was introduced to the concept. However, there's no reason why i can't drop other bits of my reality here. Today, for example, I am processing a very interesting trip to Massachusetts two of us made yesterday. As background, consider that for 4 years, I was one of two librarians responsible for maintaining/troubleshooting/setting up/training most of the libraries in Maine running Innovative Interface's Millennium software. What started out in 2002 as 11 Solar libraries an 36 Minerva libraries grew to 31 Solar and 56 Minerva libraries by the time i burned out because there were still just 2 of us keeping the dam from breaching.
I'm a glutton for punishment as last summer three of us sat down and in less than 2 hours whipped out a grant application to create an open source based library consortium in the Tri-County area here in Maine. The Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation funded it and we were off to the races. In the intervening months, we've experienced some growing pains. One library dropped out, the original server location stopped being an option and various other things happened. On the plus side, we hired a retired consultant who moved to Maine from the Washington, DC area as our project manager. He and I spent yesterday driving to central Massachusetts where we talked turkey with the folks at NELINET. I can't go into detail, but we came away very intrigued with the possibilities of working with them. Above and beyond the possible benefits to the budding consortium is the scalability potential for what we going to build. Not only might it accommodate a heck of a lot of Maine libraries down the road, but it has the capability of communicating with Milennium, thus preserving and even expanding the potential for dynamic interlibrary loan all over Maine.