TCNJ News
For Immediate Release
February 15, 2006
Student-Staff Collaboration Yields Library Benefits
EWING, NJ … Eric Thul, a senior in the Department of Computer Science at The College of New Jersey, participated in the annual conference of VALEnj, the Virtual Academic Library Environment of New Jersey, collaborating with TCNJ librarians Edward Corrado and Heather Moulaison on a presentation titled “Integrating RSS Feeds of New Library Acquisitions into a Course Management System,” an innovation that would announce new library acquisitions as a feed through the College’s Simple Online Course System (SOCS). In attendance at the conference were librarians and systems administrators from the Association of College and Research Libraries and the New Jersey Library Association (NJLA), and since their presentation, the team has been nominated for the NJLA’s College and University Section Technology Innovation Award
“An RSS [Real Simple Syndication] file can be, for example, a list of news items or events, similar to that on the College’s homepage,” explained Thul. “However, they are composed in a standard format to allow for ‘aggregators’ to pull these news items from the Web to one’s personal computer. This keeps users up-to-date with the latest news, or in this case, library acquisitions.”
“I can virtually guarantee that within a few months, applications based solidly on the work of Edward, Heather, and Eric will be popping up on college campuses all over New Jersey,” said Taras Pavlovsky, dean of library at the College.
While Corrado and Moulaison were responsible for the idea of the library acquisition feed, Thul wrote the program that made the idea happen. “Without Eric’s participation, the project probably would not have been nominated,” attested Corrado to Thul’s significant contribution.
Thul’s programming and design expertise reaches far beyond the VALEnj conference. Thul has been an employee of the College’s Departmental Applications Development Team (DADT) since 2004 and has helped create and maintain Web applications such as The Form Genie and WebAlerts, both widely used on campus.
