Ken Irwin

Librarian, Developer

Resume

Library Resume

Portfolio

This portfolio represents several of the projects I have worked on in the past decade. Many of these projects are solutions for library-specific data management challenges. A few are harder to categorize. The last two are add-on projects integrating with the much larger Suma space usage software package. I have contributed some pull requests directly to the Suma project; the projects listed here represent tools outside the scope of the main Suma program.

Sort Tetris

Demo 1: Citation Tetris
Demo 2: Presidential Tetris
GitHub Repo
An educational game adaptable to many kinds of content. Originally developed as "Citation Tetris" to teach students to recognize citations for different types of materials. It can be used to test/practice sorting image or short strings of text into two-to-five categories, such as U.S. Presidents by category. I used it as a project to experiment with gamification in educational spaces. In order to use Sort Tetris for assessment, there is an admin interface that shows users' progress over time. To instill a sense of competition (which turned out to be a strong motivator for some students), a video-game-style high scores leaderboard appears at the end of the game. To foster learning, the correct answers and a breakdown of where the user made errors appears at the end of the game. We use this tool with our reference student workers to increase their facility with recognizing different types of citations.
  • Sort Tetris example image, showing a citation text falling from the sky, waiting to be sorted as a book, article, or book chapter
  • Sort Tetris Supervisor View - display employee scores over time.
  • Sort Tetris Game Over Screen showing high scores.
  • Sort Tetris Post-Game corrections to show users what they need to work on.

Weeding Helper

Demo
GitHub Repo
Web-based software to help libraries make weeding/de-accession decisions based on item usage and external evaluations of individual items. Weeding Helper was designed to give collections librarians a way to more conveniently access and manage back-end catalog data (e.g. recency of circulation, total times circulated, consortial holdings, etc. It solves the long-standing problem of checking potential weeds against the OhioLINK catalog to determine how many other copies are available in the consortial catalog. In June 2018, I used Weeding Helper to check our holding of 1600 titles, which quickly identified aboug 20 titles that were potentially the last copies in the state. Weeding Helper minimizes grunt work and lets the librarian focus on higher-level collections decisions.
  • Weeding Helper Index Page
  • Weeding Helper Summary Graph showing numbers of books by publication year in a collection
  • Screenshot of Weeding Helper's main view, many columns of data for each book in a collection

InnReachTracker

Demo
GitHub Repo
This suite of scripts takes data exported from Innovative Interfaces (III) catalog systems to show what books have been requested from other libraries using the INNReach request system. III makes it possible for the library to access only last month's data, not a historical record. By collecting the data in a system that aggregates it over time, it is possible to detect borrowing patterns that point to collection development needs.
  • Screenshot of InnReachTracker main view -- showing titles with 'L' Call Numbers (Education books) that have been requested three or more times.
  • Screenshot of InnReachTracker upload page, allowing a user to upload data reported in a monthly report from the library catalog.

Wittenberg Library Website

Demo: Main Web Page
Demo: Torch (Student Newspaper) Index
I have managed the library’s website since I began working at Wittenberg in 1998. The current website content, functionality, and organization is largely my work. The layout and overall page design were arrived at in collaboration with the university web designers, balancing the libraries needs with the aesthetics that tie the library to the rest of the university website, and connecting the new Drupal interface to some older scripts that drive the dynamic elements of the website such as the index to the student newspaper, The Torch.
  • Screenshot of Library Main Page
  • Screenshot of Library Main Page - Mobile View

Wittenberg Food Coop

Demo: Order Page (currently inactive for summer break, but partially viewable)
I am a founding member and long-time organizer of the Wittenberg University Food Co-op. It operates as a buying club; we take orders several times per year and distribute goods ordered from local farms and business as well as fair-trade goods from further away. I wrote and manage both the customer-facing ordering website and the back-end order management system.
  • Screenshot of Food Co-op order screen
  • Screenshot of Administrative view of supplier order totals

Suma Session Manager

GitHub Repo
Suma Session Manager is a tool for modifying data that has previously been submitted to Suma: A Space Assessment Toolkit. Suma is a space usage/statistics package; it natively does not allow users to delete or modify data once it has been submitted. This session manager allows the user to "delete" (actually hide from reporting) or to alter the timestamps on individual sessions.
  • Screenshot of Suma Session Manager

Suma Retroactive Data Importer

GitHub Repo
Suma Retroactive Data Importer is a tool for retroactively submitting data into Suma: A Space Assessment Toolkit. Suma is natively intended for real-time data submission. This import generator allows the user to input data hours, days, weeks, or even years after the fact.
  • Screenshot of Suma Retroactive Data Importer, allowing the user to submit details of a space usage or reference transaction for a time other than right now.