Things I Learned About at Lunch

I had lunch today with Marc Leggott, Dave Cormier and Grant Johnson, open source warriors from the University of Prince Edward Island. They are rambling about in some interesting pastures. Some web things I learned about at lunch that I didn’t know about before:

• Loomware — UPEI Librarian Mark Leggott’s weblog.
• Dave Cormier — UPEI polymath Dave Cormier’s site and blog.
• Digitization Projects at UPEI
• DSpace — “digital repository system captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and distributes digital research material.”
• Institute of Interdisciplinary Research in Culture, Multimedia, Technology and Cognition and CMTC Virtual Research
• cribchronicles — “a dumping ground for motherhood-related ramblings.”
• Evergreen — an open source “library automation software product.”
• koha — “a full-featured open-source ILS.”

While there are plenty of cool librarians on PEI, I’ve been waiting for the arrival of a serious contingent of open source librarians, and a cabal seems to be emerging. To seriously engage with them I’m going to have to get over my prejudices against “projects with long and complicated names and many acronyms” and, indeed, “projects that have government funding.” If I can do that, there seems to be a possibility of some interesting grounds to play in.