How it started
Origins
BiblioCommons began not as a software company, but as a nonprofit youth literacy initiative. Co-founder Beth Jefferson was interested in the ways teens were using emerging technologies to engage with popular culture and wondered how youth literacy could be improved if a social context around reading could be established online. The perF!nk Project (Perceive. Feel. Think) that emerged won a national award from the Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) and began attracting broader attention – particularly, from libraries.
From perF!nk to BiblioCommons
Asking questions, the team began to explore the potential leverage of the public library’s online catalog for the end user. Could they create conversation and engagement where people already were, in the library’s web catalog?
The perf!nk project caught the attention of the Ontario Library Association, which committed research funding. Over the next 18 months, BiblioCommons conducted surveys and more than 100 one-on-one interviews in four library systems to explore the possibilities for re-envisioning the library catalog. Three Canadian provincial agencies were sufficiently impressed with the research and resulting vision to fund prototypes, and ultimately to purchase advance subscriptions. Their early commitments enabled BiblioCommons to build the envisioned services and roll them out to interested libraries in those jurisdictions.
From beta to production
From Wikipedia’s article on BiblioCommons, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2