Hello, I imagine a final use case in which children do have hundreds of books on their XO, not two or three; they are stored compressed, and uncompressed for reading; and the Journal stores the record of reading a book, but not the uncompressed book itself.
When a stick or local library with thousands or tens of thousands of books is available, it could be searched; a collection of books to be copied to your XO identified and named; and this collection added to your XO (with the name you just gave your collection added as a tag). If the Journal could implement Calibre-style views, I don't see why it couldn't function as a library organizer. SJ On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Jim Simmons <nices...@gmail.com> wrote: > Scotty, > > I've been thinking about your project and have some ideas. These may > be similar to what Sayamindu has already proposed. > > You want to distribute a couple of thousand books from Internet > Archive without using the Internet. > > As I have said before having over a thousand files on a USB drive > isn't going to work. The Journal isn't equipped to deal with that. > You had mentioned (I think) the idea of creating content bundles for > this stuff, but content bundles as they exist now aren't going to work > either. With a content bundle the entire contents of the bundle get > unpacked and stored somewhere, and on the XO there isn't room for > anything that isn't going to be used. You don't want to install 818 > books about "conduct of life" on a kid's laptop. You want to give him > something that will let him browse through all of those books and pick > one or two to install in his Journal. > > One way to make these files manageable would be to collect them by > theme or topic and put the collected books in zip files. The zip > files would contain the books themselves, the GIF files showing book > covers, and one file containing information about the books, possibly > in the Dublin Core format, more likely in some subset thereof. In the > Internet Archive database there are a lot of fields that would be > useful if filled in, but more often than not are not. > > If you had these collections prepared you could write an Activity to > browse their contents (using the Dublin Core file and the images). > The student would insert a thumb drive containing one or more of these > collections into his XO and fire up an Activity that would read the > Dublin file and create a scrolling list of the titles, including cover > images, title, author, etc. The student could sort this list by > title, author, etc. then select a book he wants and create an entry > for it in the Journal. You could prepare sticks which had the > collections on them as well as this Activity. That way everything > could be done through sneakernet. > > The Activity would be a lot like Get Internet Archive Books except it > would work offline and would show the book covers. > > James Simmons > > On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 5:39 PM, <scotty...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Jim, > > I see all your points and they are good ones. I'm not sure if there's a > > "target" country at this point, but I think we got our list from OLPC. > Not > > even positive about that. It's posted on our blog site, > > http://sixes.net/rdc2009/iacl-collection-for-xo. I'm pretty sure it's > all > > English. It's a good idea to distribute a preconfigured server boot to > linux > > CD and relatively easy. We should definately try to do that for > US/Developed > > countries. Yes, PCs that could do this are in landfills, and using a > system > > like this is a no brainer in any american or english classroom, probably > in > > most developed countries there's at least an old pc w/ a network card > laying > > about. However, my idea of using an XO was not to make it a permanent > > server. I just thought the teacher would have one most likely and that > one > > could be configured to temporarily serve the library, then reboot back to > > sugar for other purposes when done. Probably a bad idea, but then again > some > > of the OLPC folks have already looked into it at least somewhat - see > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS-on-XO. Beauty of this is even in the bush > our > > solution might still work. > > Scotty Auble > _______________________________________________ > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep >
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