[IAEP] The Children's Library On OLPC project

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 01:55, Samuel Klein<meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

What I would like to see one day is all the $HOME contents exposed in
the object view, with or without hierarchical view. The actions
related with books would be exposed in the actions view: reading,
sharing, etc.

> 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.

Aleksey has done work in this direction and I expect it to land in the
Journal during the 0.88 timeframe.

Regards,

Tomeu

> 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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