I’ve been working for a couple decades trying to bridge the worlds of libraries and archives with the World Wide Web. This work has taken me into academia, startups, corporations and the government. I work best in agile, highly collaborative teams, that want to help make the world a better place, one website at a time.

I like to use this blog as a place to throw ideas around, to see what sticks. They are my ideas alone and are not associated with my current employer. You can find my code up on Github, and my photos on Flickr. I like to chat on Twitter, and in the #code4lib IRC channel. I try to keep my CV fairly up to date. Feel free to get in touch with me via email at ehs@pobox.com, you can find my public key here.

A bit more about me…

I’ve enjoyed using several computer programming languages over the years. I guess it started with BASIC, Fortran and Pascal in the 1980s. I was very lucky to have an excellent computer science teacher in High School. We had a lot of fun. Thanks Mr Cave!

I started at university as an Engineering major, but after the first year I turned to Philosophy, then to Computer Science and finally landed in English Literature. On graduation I didn’t end up doing much work with computers. I spent three years working/traveling in the UK and then working in a used bookstore for two years in New Jersey. That’s when the Web was just starting to really take shape, so I went back to University to get a Library and Information Science degree. The best bits were learning about hypermedia. Thanks Professor Burnett!

If you really want to know more I guess you can read about the rest in my CV. The only important things that are missing from there are Kesa and my three awesome kids. Kesa, if you are reading this – thank you for sharing your hope, pragmatism, joy and life with me.

Here are a few things I’m particularly fond of that I’ve worked on in the past:

  • anon - a bot to tweet when someone edits wikipedia from a particular IP address range, like Congress
  • wikistream - a visualization of realtime edits to Wikipedia
  • pymarc - process MARC data in Python
  • bagit - a tool to package data using BagIt
  • chronam - software that runs Chronicling America at the Library of Congress
  • id - the prototype that ran at id.loc.gov to make the Library of Congress Subject Headings available as Linked Data.

You can find the rest on GitHub.