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About Bill

Hi. I’m Bill.

I’m a programmer at the University of Michigan Libraries and the Hathitrust, husband to a great writer and English Professor, father to three great kids, and …. actually, that’s about it.

I have a BA and MS in Computer Science and another MS in Instructional Technology, but these days I’m mostly a run-of-the-mill programmer.

My focus for a few years has been on the library and Hathitrust catalogs, with my interest lying mostly in figuring out how to improve search results. That opens up a whole can of worms, including how to configure our search engine (Solr), how to figure out if our search results are good or good-enough, and fighting tooth-and-nail with the data and metadata available.

In my Copious Free Time, I’ve recently started woodworking, or at least trying. We’ll see how that goes, and whether I can keep all my fingers. So far I’ve mastered the 88° angle and the process of turning random pieces of wood into smaller, still random, pieces of wood.