Advance & attack: technology demonstrator to the rescue.....and beyond

Abstract

In this paper the authors intend to show how they made use of a technology demonstrator strategy to build an integrated, light weight, virtual research environment (VRE) and convince executives that they need to support the initiative. Doing a quick search on Google or the Wikipedia very soon points out that technology demonstrators are generally associated with warfare, very expensive equipment and risk of loss of life. The authors believe however, that demonstrators are also very powerful when librarians have to do battle with executives to find appropriate funding for projects based on Web 2.0 technologies