Over at Walking Paper, Aaron describes a neat newspaper obituary index that sits neatly atop a combination of MySQL, Wordpress and a couple of plug-ins. No muss, no fuss, no send-out-an-RFP-and-spend-six-months-choosing-a-vendor.

As techie types, it’s sometimes easy to get wrapped up in selecting a system, tweaking the plumbing, optimizing queries until tomorrow, etc. Meanwhile, our users (like folks looking for their Great-Uncle’s obituary) just want to get to the data. As I’ve argued earlier, we are going to need to do more and more for ourselves instead of waiting for library vendors to solve all our problems for us. A big part of this approach is using, whenever possible, lightweight, existing tools instead of reinventing the wheel each time.