[IAEP] The Children's Library On OLPC project

[Samuel Klein]

Hello,

I imagine a final use case in which children do have hundreds of books on
their XO, not two or three; they are stored compressed, and uncompressed for
reading; and the Journal stores the record of reading a book, but not the
uncompressed book itself.

When a stick or local library with thousands or tens of thousands of books
is available, it could be searched; a collection of books to be copied to
your XO identified and named; and this collection added to your XO (with the
name you just gave your collection added as a tag).

If the Journal could implement Calibre-style views, I don't see why it
couldn't function as a library organizer.

SJ

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Jim Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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