[OLPC library] Working on a repository system for Nepal's OLPC pilot

[Jaroslaw Lipszyc]

Hi Brian,

You may want to look at our polish internet school literature library 
(beta), which is right now under development:
http://wolnelektury.pl/
Next week we will have ready documents explaining what we did and what 
we want to do, i will be happy to post it to you. Our focus is: rich xml 
  formatting, export to odt, additional tools for students and teachers 
working with classical literature, ease of use.
With very limited book offering and only basic functionality implemented 
we already have 45k+ unique users a month, so it seems that we are on 
the right track.

greetings
Jaroslaw Lipszyc

Bryan Berry napisał(a):
> I have put a lot of work these two weeks into building a prototype
> library for Nepal's pilot of OLPC. It is my understanding from an e-mail
> conversation with S.J. that OLPC hasn't decided on a repository system
> for the library. For the time being I am much more concerned about the
> back-end of the library than the user interface. I don't think that it
> will be incredibly hard to design a simple user interface for kids to
> search a repository. The harder part is to find a powerful back-end that
> will be able to accommodate our needs as they grow over time.
> 
> I have posted an image of the prototype on to OLE Nepal's blog
> http://nepal.ole.org/home/?q=node/104
> 
> I think this current UI will be good for teachers. I will need a much
> simpler one for kids.
> 
> After some cursory research, there appear to be three leading
> open-source repository systems
> 
> 
> Eprints
> 
> Dspace -- used in OpenCourseWare, and
> 
> fedora -- not to be confused with Fedora Linux 
> 
> I will also be testing out the DiVA repository set up by SF State some
> time next week, thanks to Sameer Verma. I had to get something up and
> running by this Friday (Dec. 14th) per a self-imposed deadline.
> 
> Being the incredibly lazy person that I am, I did not go to the trouble
> of installing and testing each one of these repositories. Instead I
> spent half a day reading reviews, blog posts, and news group discussions
> comparing various repository packages. After reading this evaluation of
> the leading three repository systems and watching this video, I decided
> to try out fedora.
> 
> After many painful hours I got fedora set up. Actually, it is quite easy
> to set up fedora, which is a pure web service. I found installing the
> most popular UI Fez rather difficult to get set up. I see this
> decoupling of service and UI as a strong positive in fedora's favor. We
> need a very simple kid-friendly UI for kids, a more advanced one for
> teachers, and a very advanced one for the people who will load materials
> into the library. 
> 
> I would love to hear from someone who actually knows about repository
> systems and can explain to me the benefits of one system over another. I
> will be in the US for 5 weeks starting Dec 16th and one of my goals will
> be to really understand online libraries so I can build an awesome one
> for Nepal. 
> 
> I have put a rough install guide on how to set up fedora with the Fez UI
> on Ubuntu. There are already install guides for fedora and Fez but I
> encountered several problems during the install. 
> 
> So, I would love to hear from people who actually know about these kinds
> of systems. 
> 
> By the way, e-Pustakalaya means "e-Library" in Nepali. The title in the
> upper-left of the screenshot reads the same in Devnagari script.
>