[dlpdev] minutes of london dlp meeting 20th / 10 / 04

[saul]

present: asim, fabe, saul, jo

We had a quick meetup to look at where we're at now and where we'd like 
to be soon. Here are a few notes from that.

There's no formal structure to these meetings as should be properly 
clear :) but it might be interesting, if eveyone else has meetings, to 
send the minutes here!

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- it's clear we've progressed. It's been a year and we now have several 
catalogues and a usable system.

- the initial changes suggested have been made (the dlp can now contain 
proper records (publisher, date etc... but is still lacking some features)

- asim went to pakistan and apparently the central gov. in islamabad was 
interested in this kind of system (!!) That would be dead interesting - 
so we should try to consolidate the software and processes enough to 
accommodate that kind of use.

- we need a proper programmer to work on this for a concerted time 
period. This will cost money so we should find out whre to get some. Nesta?
-- fabian said he'd find out with a social change fund source CD he has.

- there have been lots of good suggestions from everyone in the last few 
months, but we haven't acted on them yet. What are our priorities?
-- a categorisation / keyword system
-- the ability to export RDF / RSS
-- a better seaerch feature and easier to use booklists making system
-- more ways to discover new books in other libraries

- we would like to invest in public information infrastructures such as 
Wikipedia as a way of referring to unique things. For example, each copy 
of a specific book in all the dlp systems should be cross-linked to a 
page on wikipedia. This would contribute to a public domain knowledge 
infrastructure and expand it in interesting ways. We should contact them 
and ask about the possibility of something more formalised.
- does anyone know of any attempt to do somehting like this from the 
academic librarian / info scientist world?

that was about it. the things we decided to do were:

- contact wikipedia and ask them about some kind of partnership arrangement

- find out where (or if) we might be able to get money to hire a 
programmer to do this for us.

- continue with piecemeal development within our limitations until a 
programmer can be found.

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That was it!

X

Saul.