A Minimum Effort Distributed Library for KMi
This event took place on Thursday 19 May 2005 at 13:30

Tom Heath KMi, The Open University

John's original challenge was this: "So Tom if you manage to setup a running system (technology + people) which captures over 50% of what is on the shelves in KMi and maintains this for at least 3 months I'll buy you a bottle of champagne (or equivalent other alcohol)". We've made some progress and would like to share it; we hope you'll bring your lunch, come and see the demo, and help decide whether we deserve the bottle of champagne.

Background
Back in February I was looking for a book which wasn't in the OU Library but I was sure someone in KMi would have a copy; sure enough Dileep did, but I had to ask everyone explicitly before I found this out. This kick-started a discussion about whether some form of library for KMi was desirable or feasible, and what form this might take. Spurred on by academic curiousity and John's offer of alcohol, Mark and I have made some progress towards this. The work has been driven by the principle of maximum benefit for minimum effort, so we've emphasised a distributed approach and reuse of existing resources wherever possible. We'll be demo'ing what we've done tomorrow at 1:30pm in the Podium, and talking a little bit about how the work ties in with our individual PhD work in community networks and in social knowledge discovery online.