OLPC and Library Management

[SJ Klein]

Since you mention "library management" -- one aim is answering the 
question "what material is available in libraries of content near me?" and 
coordinating with the holdings of traditional and digital libraries.

While most laptop users will be far from a physical library, some will be 
near enough to use one; libraries are developing growing digital 
collections; and the school servers can function as local digital 
libraries.   OCLC (oclc.org) is interested in helping with parts of this 
problem; they already provide a search interface that looks for digital 
materials available freely online, or in paper from a library within a 
local geographic region.

On 12/28/06, MBurns <maburns at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/27/06, Adam Robinson <arobin30 at une.edu.au> wrote:
> > The web is full of useful information in an evolving model, including
> sites like Wikipedia. The challenge is what to filter.
>
> Some might say the challenge is to remove the impression that a filter
> is needed at all. But that gets into an off-topic discussion.

I'm not sure filtering (in the most commonly-used sense) is a primary 
challenge; highlighting great material might be a better description. 
What material do you want to be sure is available at a local level when 
access to the web at large is slow or unavailable?

> Is there any work/interest in having a unified content management
> system of some sort, or are each government assumed to roll their own?
> If many groups are doing the same, basic thing, we might as well see
> if we can help them collaborate by using a common infrastructure to
> organize and manage their content.

Content managment for digitizing and publishing existing materials will be 
different for each digitizer (a country or publisher, for instance).  This 
may not be a very collaborative process, so having many independent 
efforts is fine.

Organizating and classifiying information, or collecting and distributing 
new information, will be collaborative and will benefit from coordination. 
Much of the content laptop users care about will come from [groups of] 
other laptop users; there will be common infrastructure for publishing and 
sharing that work.  Many groups developing learning materials already have 
quite open CMS'es; for instance most open textbook projects are being 
developed through world-editable wikis.

>> Based on this, is the goal to provide material that governments can 
use?
>> Or a starter set of cached material, or links to that material on a web
>> server? I don't think there can be a goal to control all content on the
>> internet (though tell me if you disagree).

There will be cached material installed on the distributed laptops 
(different for each region), and larger caches of material at each school, 
on a school server.  School servers will want a way to update their 
caches, and individual laptops will want a way to update their own smaller 
collections [for instance, for when they are home and separated from the 
school].  Providing tools for this is independent from controlling what 
internet content is available; which is not the goal.


Wishing all a happy new year,
    SJ