[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Greetings -- I have a question...

[Vic Kelson]

Hi All,

I am not from a library, but I am an experienced
Linux/MySQL/PostgreSQL/Perl/C/Apache person (and the author of a GPL'd
groundwater flow model code). I'm fascinated by your project. After
reading about Evergreen, I have an idea for an application that's
probably outside your experience. Basically, I want to know if this is
even possible.

Our family lives in Bloomington, IN, a progressive town very similar
to Athens (we have several good friends in Athens, the "Bloomington of
the South"). We're also active in our community; I've just been
elected to local office, and my wife is working on global warming and
other issues. We have a _lot_ of books and other media in our two-Ph.D
home, and some months ago my wife started me working on a database of
all those resources (I've been an SQL admin since the late '80s).

We are members of an eclectic group of home-schoolers, and when my
wife mentioned that I was building a database, other families were
immediately interested, and particularly wanted to share resources.
When I saw the Evergreen software described at LinuxToday, I had an
idea...

Can we use Evergreen to build a "community library system" of sharable
resources among a group of interested participants? I envision an
"interlibrary loan" arrangement between families, as opposed to
libraries. I've looked at the descriptions and the end-user demo, and
the whole system looks very promising. I'm sure I have the computer
skills to deploy the software, and I have access to a place to host a
server, but I need to know if it's even worth trying:

How hard is it to enter the data? I assume there's an editing facility?

Would I need to deploy multiple instances on multiple servers, or can
I deploy several "libraries" on a single server? Remember, our
activity levels will be small, at least initially.

Can a mere mortal like me make this thing work? I'm not a Library
Science guy, but I have three friends who are, and I'm sure at least
one of them would be willing to help.

Anyhow, please let me know if I'm barking up the wrong tree (wouldn't
be the first time). If I think big, I can envision a community of
users, not just our home-school bunch, who are willing to share their
collections of books and other resources. A distributed community
library... wouldn't that be great fun?

THANKS for listening! At any rate, your system looks very good -- keep
up the good work!
Vic Kelson