Amy Begg De Groff joined Howard County Library as Director of Information Technology in 2005. In doing so, she joined the library system of her childhood and took on the task of seeing just how much money could be saved deploying open source solutions. Quickly, she found countless exciting open source projects, Firefox, OpenOffice.org, LDAP, Koha, to name a few; and set out to make these products come alive in Howard County.
Howard County Library is an Ubuntu shop; 100% of customer computers and 70% of staff machines are Ubuntu – remaining machines will migrate to Ubuntu in Winter of 2009-2010.
Prior to joining Howard County Library, Amy ran the records management program for Watson Wyatt Worldwide. Other professional positions have included: a library systems analyst for PTFS, Inc. and Head Reference Librarian for the Smithsonian Institutiion Libraries, American History Branch.
Amy’s advice to anyone interested in open source software is to give it a try. Firefox and OpenOffice are must-tries; Thunderbird, Meebo, and Pidgin are worthy of careful review.
Howard County Library’s focus now is deploying Koha, an open source integrated library system. Koha offers a sleek interface, full integration with Howard County Library’s website and access to the source code. The options are limitless!
Amy resides in Howard County with her husband and 2 children. They even use an Ubuntu computer at home!
I am Web Developer at Howard County Library, where I first started in 2003 through a High School internship. I spend much of my time learning and working with MySQL databases and PHP, CSS, and JavaScript programming. Over the past several I have been able to develop many tools to help improve the customer and staff experience at the library. Most recently I worked on developing a custom content management system to manage and maintain our newly designed web site.
I joke with everyone that I started working for the Howard County Library when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. It isn’t that far from the truth. I’ve worked in several departments in different capacities and learned a lot from the school of hard knocks. I hopefully bring a bit of humor, plain english vs. techie speak and the ability to view things from other viewpoints to this blog. To read more about my path to the Howard County Library, check out the meme I participated in that was started by a causal comment on Friendfeed.