Darci Hanning

I'm currently the Technology Development Consultant for Library Development at the Oregon State Library. It's my dream job that I was lucky enough to land shortly after I completed my graduate studies in Library and Information Science at the University of Washington, Information School.

All in all, that's just a long-winded way to say that I help libraries in Oregon with various bits and pieces of technology.

I became involved with Plone the fall of 2005 as the Plinkit project transitioned from an LSTA, grant-funded pilot project managed by the Multonmah County Library to an ongoing, statewide project run by, well, me.

Plinkit uses Plone to provide ready-made and easy-to-maintain websites for small and/or rural public libraries, hosted by the State Library so everything (training, support, backups, etc) is free. In the spring of 2006 three other states made the decision to start using Plinkit for their libraries and thus the Plinkit Collaborative was born.

To date, nearly 50 (of 132) public libraries in Oregon are using Plinkit; the total number of Plinkit sites in Colorado, Illinois, and Texas is over 150 and is literally growing on a weekly basis.

My involvement in the Plone community started almost immediately after Plone 2.1 was released. The lack of documentation for Plone 2.1 (which was significantly different than Plone 2.0) was my primary motivation for becoming an active member of the Documentation Team. As I expanded my knowledge of Plone I helped others via #plone on freenode.org (IRC channel). You can still often find me there as darcilicious ;-)

Also in the spring of 2006, I co-founded the Portland Plone User's group with Jon Baldivieso. In the fall of 2006 I was selected to present at the Plone Conference in Seattle and have presented at each conference since. I have also presented on Plinkit and Plone at numerous regional and national library conferences, including LITA Forum (2007) and ALA Annual (2008).

Last but not least, a second major Plone project is now part of my responsibilities: the Oregon School Libraries Information System is a Plone 3 website used to provide tutorials on information literacy for K-12 students, in addition to student friendly access to hundreds of fully indexed online journals, magazines, and other research/educational materials.

I'm currently serving my second term (October 2008 - September 2009) on the Board of Directors for the Plone Foundation, having served previously as Board President from October 2007 -  September 2008.