Our Mission

GuruLib's mission is to help catalog, connect and share books, movies, music and games between home libraries.

Who are we?

GuruLib is a privately owned website that started in April 2006 by two University of Missouri students Christina Leung and Mohammed Rana Basheer. Mohammed is currently a PhD. candidate in Computer Engineering at Missouri University of Science & Technology (MST) while Christina is pursuing her Master's in Art History at University of Missour-Kansas City (UMKC). She also has a bachelors in Accounting from Truman State University.

GuruLib spawned out of the excel document that Christina used to maintain to catalog her collection of books, movies and music. Whenever she loans a book or movie she used the excel sheet to track them. On one of her long walks to the writing center at UMKC she had the eureka moment of developing an online database that will help her with book and movie cataloging. With the help of her Mohammed they started developing GuruLib. The core feature list of GuruLib is mostly inspired by their day to day problem of keeping track of their book and movie collections. Being students with limited income loaning from friends or public libraries became the main way to feed their avid interest in reading books.

Mohammed is mostly responsible for the coding and publicity while Christina concentrated on high level design and testing. For more than a year GuruLib ran as a two person operation with Mohammed contacting Librarians and Bloggers to spread the word. Very early on, GuruLib was blessed with core group of ardent users who provide us with feedback and suggestions to improve GuruLib.

In August of 2007, Jordan Varble, a fellow MST student, joined GuruLib. He was responsible for giving GuruLib its new, youthful look. He is a very talented website designer, a Civil Engineering undergrad and an entrepreneur with an outdoor adventure business called J&P Adventures. Mohammed and Jordan met at MST through an on campus entrepreneur society called Technical Innovators & Entrepreneurs Society (TIES).

We have been improving GuruLib, going to book conventions, blogging and promoting GuruLib. Your feedback and suggestions help us tweak and tune this wonderful webservice to cater to the ever growing needs of a home library.