Who's Using What - Sebastian Hierl Developer Profile

After being inspired by our last Who's Using What column, we are proud to welcome Dr. Sebastian Hierl from the American Academy in Rome to our growing community of FLOSSers. Before becoming Drue Heinz Librarian of the Arthur & Janet C. Ross Library, Dr. Hierl was responsible for developing the Widener Library’s Western European collections at Harvard University. Hierl is a strong supporter of Koha as an ILS (integrated library system) for its web-based interface and flexibility as well as the strong and growing community of instituions and developers. So without further ado, Dr. Sebastian Hierl from the American Academy in Rome!

What open source tools are you currently working with?

The institutions of the Koha Gruppo Italiano, composed of the American Academy in Rome, The American University of Rome, and the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce, all use the Open Source ILS, Koha. We are among an increasing number of Koha libraries in Rome and throughout Italy.

What open source tools have you used in the past to develop larger applications?

Principally, we implemented Koha in our libraries and contributed to the development of select features and the resolution of "bugs."

What are you currently developing?

We are currently working with the Koha community and with EBSCO on replacing the current Zebra search engine in Koha with ElasticSearch. The community, under the leadership of ByWater Solutions, aims at providing ElasticSearch as an alternate search engine, thus offering a choice to all Koha libraries between Zebra and ElasticSearch. (Read more about the collaboration here.)

What would you like to see developed?

For the Italian Koha community, we would like to develop a search API integrating Koha with the Italian union catalogue, the OPAC catalogo SBN, of the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico delle biblioteche italiane e per le informazioni bibliografiche. Such an integration would dramatically increase interest in Koha as an Open Source ILS in Italy. It would help all current Koha libraries in Italy and strengthen the entire Koha community. We further would like to see greater integration of linked data with Koha and our hope is that the current development with ElasticSearch will foster this development.

Image credit: The triumphal arch of Constantine, Rome, Italy from Boston Public Library (No known copyright restrictions).