I'm looking at helping digitise a specialist library, wondered if anyone here had any experience?

A friend of mine is the main IT-person in an university library. He could probably help.
Are you thinking about buying a scanner or what?

It's quite a big job so yes a scanner would be needed, I'm really looking to find someone who's used any of the open source repository products like:

http://www.eprints.org/
http://www.fedora.info/
http://www.dspace.org/

I know a librarian but she's never used anything open source.

I read the thread title wrong, and had a brief moment of "oh God, not another political thread."

Well, what a coincidence, that friend is just busy setting up a dspace server.

It depends mostly on what programming language and database you want to use:
Eprint: Perl with Mysql
Dspace: Java with Postgress or Oracle
Fedora: Java with Almost all databases

One disadvantage of dspace is the way the files are saved. The pdf's are saved 3 to 4 layers deep, and get a number as name.
The database gets quite complex too, because everything is linked to everything else with 'unique identifiers'

Hey, you'd think i knew what i was talking about here, just relaying / translating though

Thanks schido I'll pass that on (likewise I am just a conduit)