[IAEP] The Children's Library On OLPC project

[Jim Simmons]

Scotty,

I've been thinking about your project and have some ideas.  These may
be similar to what Sayamindu has already proposed.

You want to distribute a couple of thousand books from Internet
Archive without using the Internet.

As I have said before having over a thousand files on a USB drive
isn't going to work.  The Journal isn't equipped to deal with that.
You had mentioned (I think) the idea of creating content bundles for
this stuff, but content bundles as they exist now aren't going to work
either.  With a content bundle the entire contents of the bundle get
unpacked and stored somewhere, and on the XO there isn't room for
anything that isn't going to be used.  You don't want to install 818
books about "conduct of life" on a kid's laptop.  You want to give him
something that will let him browse through all of those books and pick
one or two to install in his Journal.

One way to make these files manageable would be to collect them by
theme or topic and put the collected books in zip files.  The zip
files would contain the books themselves, the GIF files showing book
covers, and one file containing information about the books, possibly
in the Dublin Core format, more likely in some subset thereof.  In the
Internet Archive database there are a lot of fields that would be
useful if filled in, but more often than not are not.

If you had these collections prepared you could write an Activity to
browse their contents (using the Dublin Core file and the images).
The student would insert a thumb drive containing one or more of these
collections into his XO and fire up an Activity that would read the
Dublin file and create a scrolling list of the titles, including cover
images, title, author, etc.  The student could sort this list by
title, author, etc. then select a book he wants and create an entry
for it in the Journal.  You could prepare sticks which had the
collections on them as well as this Activity.  That way everything
could be done through sneakernet.

The Activity would be a lot like Get Internet Archive Books except it
would work offline and would show the book covers.

James Simmons

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 5:39 PM, <scottymon at gmail.com> wrote:
> Jim,
> I see all your points and they are good ones. I'm not sure if there's a
> "target" country at this point, but I think we got our list from OLPC. Not
> even positive about that. It's posted on our blog site,
> http://sixes.net/rdc2009/iacl-collection-for-xo. I'm pretty sure it's all
> English. It's a good idea to distribute a preconfigured server boot to linux
> CD and relatively easy. We should definately try to do that for US/Developed
> countries. Yes, PCs that could do this are in landfills, and using a system
> like this is a no brainer in any american or english classroom, probably in
> most developed countries there's at least an old pc w/ a network card laying
> about. However, my idea of using an XO was not to make it a permanent
> server. I just thought the teacher would have one most likely and that one
> could be configured to temporarily serve the library, then reboot back to
> sugar for other purposes when done. Probably a bad idea, but then again some
> of the OLPC folks have already looked into it at least somewhat - see
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS-on-XO. Beauty of this is even in the bush our
> solution might still work.
> Scotty Auble