i did as perrin said, added it via 'use lib' and a 'use' statement in startup.perl. unfortunately all httpd processes grew significantly in size.
'ps aux' from:
10048 6640
11840 6216
11812 6192
to:
14104 10848
15080 11940
15120 11980

doesn't seem like this should be the case. platform is suse linux 8.0