LionsSHARE is the first project undertaken here at Librarylion.com. It is designed to function as a very small, highly selective grouping of websites useful for librarians and library users in their seaches on the World Wide Web for answers to reference or research questions. The core of the project's content comes from the rebirth of the old Internet Directory maintained by Librarylion's creator. Please see Where Did LionsSHARE come from? for more details about the origin of the initial group of links.

LionsSHARE is not meant to be a full scale search engine. We are not trying to create the next Yahoo!. LionsSHARE is an experiment as much as anything else. Will others find their way here? Will an extremely limited list of websites tailored to fit the needs of one library be meaningful outside the library where it originated? LionsSHARE is an attempt to find out.

Just about the only similarity between Yahoo! and LionsSHARE is the fact that yes, Virginia, the capital letters stand for something. In Yahoo's case, rumor has it that YAHOO originally stands for Yet Another Highly Officious Oracle. In LionsSHARE's case, the SHARE stands for Splendid Hyperlinks Are Revealed to Everyone--until, of course, we think of something else!

Currently, "we" is really me, Amanda. I have worked as a reference librarian for eight years and I graduated with a Masters in Library and Information Science in December, 2001. I have been a computer user since 1987, a PC owner since 1988, a Mac owner since 1993, and a Dell owner since 1998, which is the same year I began working at a public library in South Carolina. When I'm not sitting in front of my computer working on something, I'm reading a Terry Pratchett novel or possibly playing with the family cat, Fluffy. The most frightening thing I have ever done with a computer was to probe inside a disk drive with a pair of hemostats in order to extract the metal part of a disk which was stuck inside it. Don't tell the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; it was one of their computers and it had a nasty habit of eating disks. The worst thing I have ever seen done to a computer was done live with a sledgehammer on "The Screen Savers", once the flagship computer help show on the now defunct TechTV cable network. (I do not consider the above comment a form of advertising since the entire network has effectively disappeared!)

LionsSHARE began as a brief list of web links kept near the Internet computers at the SC public library where I work.

I inherited responsibility for the list when I began working there. My predecessor had compiled the links primarily from a weekly list of recommended websites sent around by a fellow library employee. I quickly realized that the best way to maintain the list was to put it on a website for easy link verification.

The Internet Directory, as it was called, lived on my personal homepage at Angelfire.com for several years. Its size grew, and it evolved into a miniature site with a page for each category of links as well as a page listing all the links so that users could easily print them. Experienced webmasters: Insert cringe here: I didn't store the links in any sort of database since I didn't know how to do that. I just had to change links twice whenever editing was required. Eek!

LionsSHARE was born out of several somewhat related necessities. First, I wanted to keep my public library's name away from any site that contained advertising. I believe that outside advertising runs counter to the spirit of public libraries, so with Angelfire's addition of popup ads, it was no longer an ideal home for the links. The second necessity was a more personal, selfish reason. I had owned the domain name librarylion.com long enough to have to renew it and I had no idea what I might do with it. Thirdly, I wanted it to be something related to libraries, but I didn't have any specific idea as to how it would be related. I also needed a project for one of my last two classes in library school and this reworking of the Internet Directory would qualify. Finally, I wanted to change the structure of the website so that I could store the links in a database which would allow me to make necessary changes once rather than twice as I had been doing. Prodded by these selfless and selfish reasons, the Internet Directory was radically restructured to creat LionsSHARE.

Sure! Please visit our Contact page to point out a potential site to us. We strive to be highly selective, so every submission will not necessarily appear in the list. We promise to look at every site you send to see if it fills a hole in LionsSHARE. If you know of a reference tool on a website that you could not live without, we want to SHARE it if we can!