The Problem
Journal lookups are everyday work for a library team supporting researchers across a company — and they add up. The team needed a better way to handle them, and the obvious route was purchasing a product from an external vendor. That meant paying vendor prices for something the team understood well enough to build itself.
What I Built
I built Journal Finder in-house: a lookup tool made for the library team's own work, shaped by the people who use it every day. Instead of fitting the team's process around a vendor product, the tool fits the team — and because it is ours, it can be adjusted as the team's needs change, with no license to renew.
Built for the team's actual work
Designed around the lookups the ORacLe team performs in support of researchers across the organization — not around a vendor's generic feature list.
Owned, not rented
An in-house tool means no purchase, no subscription, and no waiting on a vendor roadmap when the team needs a change.
The Result
$10,000+ in vendor cost avoided
By building instead of buying, the team avoided more than $10,000 in external vendor cost.
Time and money saved, ongoing
Journal Finder continues to save the team time and money on lookups — the savings did not end with the purchase that never happened.
The build-vs-buy judgment behind Journal Finder is the same one I apply across the library's toolset: work with vendors where they add real value, and build in-house where the team knows the problem best. More on that in the ORacLe Digital Library project.