[dlpdev] notes from our meeting on wednesday

[Saul Albert]

hi all,

dlp people met in larc the other day and there were some interesting issues
raised. I'm sorry I couldn't make it to larc again today but I was a bit
messy and had to get back to bristol for my last week.

here's some notes about what we talked about - hopefully we can develop
them further soon.

some of these are LARC/east london specific, so other dlpdevs,
apologies.


- Technical Legal issues

we need to work on the software - in all the ways that have been
expressed already. It looks like there's actually some money from an
Arts Council project to develop software that will address lots of the
really interesting issues about categorisation and cataloguing that have
been raised here. This should be starting in the next few months. In the
meantime, Saul will try to plug some gaps in the existing software, but
maybe we'd best concentrate on developing social / physical resources
until something really useful comes along.

- there's a good example of emergent categorisation systems that use
  semantic web strategies here: http://del.icio.us - it's a bookmark
sharing system (which is basically a meta-information sharing system -
like a library catalogue that only contains links to web sites). This
model (try it out) might be a good way of thinking about categorisation
of lots of different kinds of resources - books, vids, links, zines,
papers, flyers, maps etc..
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PGA meeting in Belgrade - 14th April

Larc library team will go to Belgrade for a library meeting (amongst
other troublemaking activities). Maybe we should make some kind of
publicity / contact material about what we're doing so it's easier to
stay in touch and collaborate with euro-wide libraries on catalogueing
and other common concerns.
------------

- ELSA - east london specialist archive

Ish proposed that we should found the East London Specialist Archive - a
group of distributed libraries - some small & self-organised, some
larger and established. This association could be used to share ideas
and books - techniques, training and other resources. This could be a
way of Ish campaigning for retaining Whitechapel library for continued
library usage (rather than it becoming part of a the Whitechapel
gallery). This sounded good to everyone I think.

We also thought it would be a good way of getting access to training
resources (ie. preservation and archiving of physical resources). We
could try to get some workshops organised so we can all learn these
techniques. Suggested organisation to help us was LARC (!) London
Archives Regional Council ;)

Suggested members of ELSA to begin wiht:

LARC
Limehouse Town Hall
Docker's Club
Freedom Books
Mute

others?

Elsa could use the Distributed Library Project as a cataloguing system.

to begin elsa, we'd probably need just a simple map with links to all
our library catalogues / sites.

-----------------------

that'a about all I remember. I hope we can start to move on some of this
stuff soon, but there seems t obe a lot going on at the moment...

Cheers, and hope to see you all soon.

Saul.