Student Workers as Library Programmers: A Case Study in Automated Overlap Analysis

This paper describes a single solution to two very different problems. The first problem is that undergraduate students who aspire to careers in programming or software development need real‐world work experiences that are not always readily available. The second problem is that in considering whether to acquire large e‐book packages, libraries need to be able to answer the question, “How many of these do we already have?” Currently, most ILSs do not include a built‐in feature to address the need for this kind of overlap analysis. In order to develop a simple, low‐impact technical solution to this second problem, the library at California Baptist University also helped to address the first. We hired one upper division Electrical and Computer Engineering student to create a method to easily assess the redundancy of titles between large e‐book packages and current holdings. The objective of this paper is twofold: to advocate for increased high‐level use of student workers enrolled in computer science or computer engineering programs, and to share one simple, affordable way for libraries to assess the feasibility of large e‐book packages.