Jason Thomale, the UNT Libraries’ Resource Discovery Systems Librarian since 2011, maintains some of the primary systems the library uses to manage materials and make them available to patrons. His work aims to facilitate research on campus by improving the interfaces people use to find library resources. But Jason faces two major challenges. First, having different types of resources managed via different systems provided by different vendors thwarts attempts to provide a consistent user experience. Second, legacy library data—much of it based on decades old formats—does not readily lend itself to easy search, retrieval, and display, despite its richness.

This work of course is ongoing, but, to help overcome these challenges, Jason has spearheaded multiple system development and implementation projects. He led implementation of a discovery system that enables searching online article content across providers. He developed the interface used on the library website that sends users’ searches to multiple library systems simultaneously and retrieves results. Most recently, he built a data store that extracts and modernizes legacy library data and then makes it available to search clients via an accompanying API. His current project will use this data store as the basis for a new and improved online catalog.