[OLPC library] [Grassroots-l] Pratham Books in Nepal

[David Farning]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 11:02 AM, sulochan<sulochan at olenepal.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-07-30 at 00:03 -0500, David Farning wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 11:03 PM, Rabi Karmacharya<rabi at olenepal.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 7:50 AM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 7:50 PM, Rabi Karmacharya<rabi at olenepal.org>
>> >> wrote:
>> >> > The books (and many more) can be accessed by children at the OLPC pilot
>> >> > schools in Nepal through the e-library that OLE Nepal has created. The
>> >> > e-library is hosted in school servers in each pilot school, and is
>> >> > updated
>> >> > regularly. The e-library can also be accessed on the Internet at
>> >> > www.pustakalaya.org (pustakalaya is library in Nepali). The e-library
>> >> > was
>> >> > launched in February 2009, and OLE Nepal continues its efforts to expand
>> >> > the
>> >> > content by contacting various organizations, publishers and writers to
>> >> > make
>> >> > their works available to children all over the world.
>> >>
>> >> Rabi,
>> >>
>> >> That look great!
>> >>
>> >> What are you using for a content management system? I am interested in
>> >> setting up library.sugalabs.org for testing and then creating some
>> >> wiki pages so deployments can benefit from your work.
>> >>
>> >> david
>> >
>> > David.
>> >
>> > Our pustakalaya is built on Fedora Commons with Fez in the front end. It is
>> > a relatively static library, and we do not have the facilities for teachers,
>> > students, and users to upload their works in the library. Right now all the
>> > uploading and management is done by the staff at OLE Nepal.
>> >
>> > Our primary goal was to create a repository of education materials (books,
>> > videos, maps, etc) that children can access easily at their schools. As you
>> > may know, there is a dearth of such materials in many parts of Nepal, and
>> > teachers and students have barely any reading materials outside of their
>> > course books. We do plan to add rating and uploading facilities in future,
>> > but right now, our focus is on adding more content to expand our
>> > collections.
>> >
>> > You can direct technical questions to our library system developer, Sulochan
>> > (cc'ed above).
>> >
>> > Cheers.
>> > -Rabi
>> >
>>
>> Hello Sulochan. Nice to meet you!
>>
>> Last week DSD added some interesting thoughts to a discussion we were
>> having on updating activities.
>>
>> Currently, on a project level, we are using activities.sugarlabs.org
>> as a central repository for activities. I think we will also host
>> content there.  The software for a.sl.o will not scale down enough to
>> run on school.  I am wondering if you think that it would be valuable
>> for Sugar Labs to leverage your work and make system such as
>> pustakalaya available as a resource for all deployments.
>>
>> thanks
>> david
>
> Hi David,
> Yeah i think its a good idea to have one software pkg that all
> deployments can use for content delivery. Like Rabi mentioned,
> pustakalaya has facilitated easy access of many types of digital
> materials to our deployment schools.
> Currently we use Fedora Commons--an open source digital repository
> system, supports REST/SOAP, full text index search, easy administration,
> client support, and much more and is very scalable. It can hold any type
> of digital object.
> Here is a link to fedora commons--www.fedora-commons.org
> We use a modified FEZ --which is an open source front end for
> fedora-commons.
>
> Right now i have a very off hand way of installing it on the XS, the
> script works well for the XS, but some work will be needed to get it
> working for all types of systems.
> The second challenge, should something like this be used by other
> deployments is the way you would update content through network. Its not
> very difficult to do this but again there needs to be a way that works
> for all. Schools can easily add their own content but need to work on a
> model to allow schools to share, should they choose to do so with other
> schools, and if there is a central repository that updates all XS, a way
> to do that, and more :)
>
> Once these issues are resolved, something like pustakalaya will be a
> great addition to all deployments.
> I am also working on adding on lot of features, in some ways similar to
> a.sl.o ( user uploads,user rating, users comments, more linking
> features, bookmarking, user-user messaging and sharing etc. Some of
> which is already done and will show up on pustakalaya soon) but so far
> we have focused on content.
>
> If you are planing to start something like this for all deployments i
> will be happy to contribute.

Thanks for the information.  It looks like this would be a very good
piece to make available to the wider community of sugar users.

In terms of triaging, I would like to focus on creating deployer
feedback channels.  From there we can see what we can do about making
your work more widely available.

david

> best,
> Sulochan Acharya
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