Volunteer work does not move forward like commercial equivalents. People are contributing their sweat and time, but they still need to earn a living.

We are looking at funding sources and welcome your own suggestions in this regard and others. It’s a Catch 22. Without an infrastructure, it’s harder to get funding–and yet without money, it takes more time to come up with a Web site up to our standards.

But we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Jeff Fobbe, our technical director, who helped set up the ERIC site for the U.S. Department of Education, is hard at work on the prototype LibraryCity site based on Drupal, and we’ve just obtained the pro bono services of a gifted Web designer working for a book publisher. Once the site is up, we’ll have something tangible to show funders. We already have serious prospects who have been following us for a long time.

Meanwhile we’ve hung on to our most valuable asset, our people. Most everyone with a serious interest in LibraryCity has remained a volunteer. When the money comes, the expertise will be there in abundance to use it wisely.

Please also note that we are working on some innovative new concepts–things that we can’t simply buy from the usual suspects. What’s the point of LibraryCity if it just replicates what’s already out there?

Email me about yourself. Maybe you’ll fit in and have ideas for speeding things up.

Believe me, we’re just as impatient as you are to see LibraryCity happen. But we want the results to justify the wait.