About the Site
Short answer: no. Now to the long one.
Your university is paying librarians and computer professionals to
have the book loans system on a software called ALEPH.
ALEPH, while fine when it comes to doing its job, doesn't know how to
renew books daily and to send email warnings, both desirable features
for most students.
This is where we come in. We offer a third-party service to do that. It
contacts ALEPH on your behalf, and sends you email if it thinks there's
something you should know about. This is a self-sustaining project, run by
students and ex-students. At this point (November 2004), we do not
receive any funding from any university, library, or student association.
(However, in the past we did receive a long-running donation of
hardware and bandwidth kindly donated by the Technion CS department.)
We are not affiliated with any library. Some libraries link to us from
their web site, but the fact remains the same. We have no powers to
change your reader status, or do anything that you cannot do yourself
without the help of a librarian.
So, occasionally we will tell you we simply can't solve your
problem. You will have to make contact with librarian from your library
yourself, and ask him or her to look into it. After all, besides being
their job, they are genuinely happy to help.
As you already understand, this is a voluntary effort. We have no PR
budget, and our publicity is limited by the good will of people who
control media channels. We ask all libraries we support to advertise
us on their web pages and bulletin boards. Some do, others don't.
However
you can help! If you think this service is valuable,
please advertise us on your personal home page, tell about us to your
friends, ask your librarian to advertise our existence on the
library's bulletin board, etc. We will be grateful.
We will not transfer your personal details, including your email
address, to no other party. We will use it exclusively to send you
messages about your books, and to notify you about system-related issues
that may affect you. The only exception to this rule is the
use of information we have to help find security breaches and investigate
abuse. In this case, the logs of your activities may be passed to law
enforcing officials or to other parties that take part in such
investigations. For the full statement, read the
usage agreement.
This system is run on a voluntary basis. A thank-you
letter
would be nice, but you don't even have to do that.
In other words, we don't require you to pay. But that doesn't
mean we don't have operating expenses. In fact we do, and they do
add up. So if you feel the service is useful to you, and want
to help us in return, we set up a donation
account which you can transfer money to from your credit
card. The suggested donation is 50 NIS (or 10 US$) per year of
usage.
Well, we don't claim to be web-designers. On the other hand, if you think you can do better than us, you're welcome to participate in our
design contest!
Yes, we can now read and reply to mail sent in Hebrew. The preferred
way to do this is to send it in HTML. But other methods should work as
well.
Short answer: No and No. This is a free service, but we're not releasing
any software. If you just want your library to be supported, look
here. If you want to tinker with the code,
you're more than welcome to
join the team.
Use the
mailing
list's web page
The 'libagent news and announcements' option is intended just for messages
sent from the LibAgent team to users, regarding matters that immediately affect their
book renewal status. On the other hand, messages to the
"discussion" mailing list can be sent by anyone (as long as
they're subscribed to the list), and can also relate to future changes to
the service.
For a long while (1996 - 2004) LibAgent's network connection is kindly
provided by the Technion's
Computer
Science Department. They
were also so kind as to donate two
dedicated
machines to run this service on. They were in service between
1999-2004.
In July 2004 we moved to a commercial hosted server, with the monthly
fees are paid by the users' donations. This relieved us from the need to
take care of hardware. Our current host is John Companies.
Amir Ben-Dor
and
Dan Pelleg
, both graduate students at the Technion, started this whole thing
one day back in October 1996. The old method of automatic book
extension stopped working one day due to an ALEPH version
upgrade. Dan thought that writing a new program in
Perl
was a good way to learn the language. Amir, the local Perl Guru,
guided him through. Not long afterwards more people in their
vicinity wanted the same program to work for them as well. At
first, they were given copies of the program, which was designed to
work for just one student. As the number of users grew, it became
harder and harder to transport the program (and it's bug-fixes!)
to them all. This brought up the idea of a centralized
service, and one was established. It used resources of the
faculty of Computer Science
in the Technion, and we thank them for that. On July '97 a major
re-implementation took place, including better support for multiple
libraries, improved Web interface and tightened security.
During the first half of 1998, both Amir and Dan have
graduated from the Technion and left. LibAgent needed a new
maintainer. In response to Dan's plea for help, Nadav Eiron,
also a graduate student at the Technion, volunteered. Since
then, LibAgent saw an exponential growth in its users'
community. This prompted the dedication by the CS department
of a server machine specifically to LibAgent's needs in June
1999. Dan Pelleg then briefly rejoined Nadav and together they
ported LibAgent to its new machine.
Soon afterwards, with the growth of LibAgent, Nadav felt that
LibAgent should have more than one maintainer. Michael
Tsirkin, also a graduate student at the department,
volunteered to help. However, at around February 2000, Michael
decided to leave the LibAgent support team. LibAgent was, yet
again, left with a maintenance team that's far too small for
its needs.
In August 2000, Adnan Agbaria,
A Ph.D. student in the Technion's CS department joined
LibAgent's team. As the work load seemed to be more than one
Ph.D. student can handle, another volunteer, Zvi Avidor, was
recruited. Our quest for more volunteers has brought Sami
Halabi to volunteer to be a part-time LibAgent sysadmin. And in the
Fall of 2001 Amir Nusbaum joined the ranks of the developers.
In August 2001, Dolev Birkman joined the team. He handled user's
requests until graduating from the Technion. In April 2003, Hanan
Mandel stepped up to take the same job.
Perhaps you'd like join us too?