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

[sulochan]

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. 

best,
Sulochan Acharya