Bess Sadler - Tech Leaders - 2010 Movers & Shakers

Bess Sadler, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville

Deep Technologist Bess Sadler, in her own words, has “spent the past four years defining, developing, and delivering information systems and infrastructure” for the University of Virginia (UV) Library. Currently, she is working on providing patrons with an updated Web 2.0–style interface design that will allow them to search physical and digital holdings at the same time. Sadler's also been busy implementing a Fedora 3 digital repository. Driven by passion to keep libraries relevant, as Bradley Daigle, director of digital curation at UV, puts it, Sadler applies her thinking beyond her job as well.

She is proud of her work with code4lib, the annual conference where library techies meet to share ideas and software. She organized the 2007 solr code4lib preconference (solr is an open source full-text search server; lucene.apache.org/solr), which she believes was one of the key reasons why libraries started using solr as a search engine.

With her hands full managing several open source development projects, Sadler has become “an open source software evangelist,” according to Michael Klein, digital applications librarian at Oregon State University Libraries. He says her enthusiasm and “tireless promotion” of Project Blacklight (an open source “next-generation catalog” that employs solr to search heterogeneous collections; projectblacklight.org) has led to the open source product's quick adoption by other library techies for ongoing development.