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

[Jason Etheridge]

On 12/30/06, Don McMorris <don.mcmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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:
>
> This is something that can absolutely be done.  It is something I've
> been considering also, but haven't taken the time to start yet.

I've seen something like this before, but for the life of me I can't
find a link.  I remember it was more commercial and wanted you to
buy-in with a nominal fee or something.  It felt kind of like a
distributed Netflix.

One pie in the sky thought I had before is that it would be cool if
someone were to offer  a stable and maintained instance of EG for
public/casual non-mission-critical use, similar to those free unix
shell accounts you can get your hands on.  It would be open to anyone
like GPLS's demo and dev servers, but not subject to the whims of us
developers who enjoy restarting services, changing features, tweaking
permissions, and purging the database all the time. :D

So, for example, I could conceivably get an account on this server and
create my own JasonBranch library, and maybe configure my own circ
rules to say that I'd be willing to lend books to BradSystem.

There are a quite a few hurdles that would have to be crossed for this
to become a reality, but it'd certainly be fun. :)  Of course, other
projects like LibraryThing might evolve in that direction, and then
maybe we could try pushing OpenNCIP development (thank you David
Fiander!) to link them all together.  There's no need for a
monoculture.

-- 
Jason Etheridge
GPLS -- PINES Development
http://open-ils.org/