Library Elf

My wife homeschool's our four boys. This is an insane amount of work for her. Somehow she manages it. But life just got a little bit easier. She's part of a homeschool group and one of the other members told her about Library Elf. This is a really cool service.

We live right on the border of two counties. We live in the much smaller of the two counties. The larger county has a very big library system and the smaller county has a small one. So we pay an annual fee to be a member of the library in big library system. So between my wife and me, we have 4 library cards. But it gets more complicated because our 2 oldest children also have library cards in each of the counties. Our 3rd oldest has one in the big county. All together we have a total of 9 library cards that we need to keep track of.

And then, on top of that, in order to homeschool, my wife will frequently go to the library and get 30 books. While she's doing that, our kids will decide that they want to check out some books on their own library card. We are constantly going to different library websites and putting books on hold and returning them. And it takes some time to login to each account and make sure that everything is copacetic.

But not anymore. I just logged into Library Elf, created a free account, put in all the library cards that we have and it tells me on a single web page:

1. What we have out
2. What we have on hold, but not yet ready
   
3. What we have on hold, and ready to pick up
4. What we have due
5. What we have overdue

I've configured it so that it will send my wife an email 4 days before anything is due, and whenever a hold is available. At the same time, it generates an RSS feed for me that I can read in google reader.

This is a cool website.