Here are some comments from customers. If you have a comment about John Craig or Alpha-G you'd like to have posted, send it along.

RE: John Craig (From a long-time Horizon customer)
John Craig is one of the most knowledgeable, dedicated and customer-centered programmers that I know. He has worked in library automation programming for over 10 years and during that time, he has gained great respect in the library community as well as in the programming community. John has been involved in programming the Horizon product from its inception and as a result, he knows this product in and out. He will be impossible to replace at epixtech!

Joan M. Gregory,
First President, Horizon Users Group, 1993-94
Acting Past President and webmaster, Horizon Users Group, 1999-2000.

From a former colleague and customer
I would highly recommend John Craig for consulting work on the Horizon system. I learned a great deal from John while working at the vendor myself and he was active in making modifications that optimized Horizon for the large system at University of Chicago after initial installation. If you need consulting work, I do not know of a more qualified professional to assist you.

Frances McNamara
Head, Integrated Library Systems
University of Chicago Library

A Horizon-L Subscriber
John Craig offers expert assistance. He helped me to better understand the process of creating complicated joins in SQL and explained the process of creating mq_views for the Horizon Library Automation Software by epixtech. His communication skills are excellent. The instructions he provided me were explicit and complete.

Annette Britain
System Administrator
Wichita Falls Public Library

A Current Customer
[From a posting to Horizon-L] A few months ago, there was some discussion on the list about the desire to be able to determine who had previously borrowed an item that was now checked out to another person. Because the need for this information was arising so frequently at our library, we hired John Craig of Alpha-G to solve the problem. John was able to set us up with previous borrower histories on the item records. If a patron calls and says, "Hey! I just checked out the latest Grisham on audio, but tape number 3 is from Clark's last book," we have a way to find out who has checked out both items previously so that we can give them a friendly call to see if the correct tape is still in their player.

John also created the needed scripts to get correct group checkout figures. We circulate a large number of uncataloged paperbacks daily, and we needed Horizon to give us an accurate count instead of having staff manually track this. Before John's fix, it didn't matter what staff entered for the number of pieces on the group checkout screen, it still counted it as a single checkout. John even went a step farther--not only does Horizon now properly count the group checkouts, it automatically checks the group barcode back in so that it can be used for the next patron.

Several people had mentioned the need to have previous borrower information and correct group checkout info, and I would encourage you to contact John. He was a great help to us, and I have every intention of keeping him on retainer to solve the problems that baffle me!

Deanna Frazee
Director of Library Services
Killeen, Texas