The end of the year is always exciting, and 2004 was no exception. One of our Bookshare.org users, Jay Leventhal, contacted me about making a donation at the end of the year. Jay was particularly interested in making the search capabilities of Bookshare.org better than our existing simple author or title searches. This is something we have been wanting to do for a long time: something more like the advanced search of Google or Amazon.

In a rapid flurry of email, our engineering and Bookshare.org teams came up with quick estimate of time and cost to implement such a feature and we ran it by Jay. Jay made the donation the last Friday of 2004 and we are already at work figuring out how to implement the feature over the next couple of months, which will benefit not only Jay but thousands of Bookshare.org users.

Funding engineering work is always our biggest challenge, because it is not typical philanthropy. We really appreciate funders who actively engage us both in funding engineering and who understand what these improvements mean to the users of our technology.

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