[Olpc-open] Working on a repository system for Nepal's OLPC pilot

[tekelsey at gmail.com]

I am not an expert but have been impressed with what I witnessed of subversion. I think that there was also an earlier post about another system that might open up as an extension of the local filesystem.

Perhaps you might wish to create a wiki page, "content repositories", and a page linking to it called "content repository", to catch search terms, and put brief bullets on there with profiles of systems, as well as a link to the nepal project.

-----Original Message-----

From:  Bryan Berry <bryan.berry at gmail.com>
Subj:  [Olpc-open] Working on a repository system for Nepal's OLPC pilot
Date:  Thu Dec 13, 2007 7:35 am
Size:  2K
To:  library <library at lists.laptop.org>; olpc-open <olpc-open at lists.laptop.org>

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

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