The big news this week – we are getting set up for our Second Annual Launch Party (which is essentially a fun way for us to demo all of the cool work we have been doing over the summer)! We will be demonstrating our work with digital books, plus creating a few analog specimens in the process. The event will take place at our headquarters on 246 Sixth Street in Port Orford, OR, over Labor Day Weekend. If you are in the area, please drop by. It will be fun!

The primary agenda item for this #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday was syncing up on “The Sugar Solution.” As we reported last week, we were thinking that modifying the GIAB activity might be the best route to go – but as we delved deeper into the problem, we discovered that offering a straight-forward HTML/CSS solution in the XO default browser from the SoaS stick itself solved all manner of technical problems. For one thing, it does not overload the Journal with the entire index of the bundle. It also enables us to repurpose the design solutions that we are already addressing in our web user interface. Recycling is good, even on the web! We still think that the idea of building this into Sugar is a “Very Good Idea (TM)” and should be pursued … and we plan to look at it in the future.

We are also taking a look at our overall collection. We want to maximize the distribution of material throughout categories that may be of interest to kids. We currently have categories that have 800+ items that may (or may not) hold a child’s interest. We would prefer to have more categories available in this sample collection. We are not librarians (as we mentioned going into this), so we are going to invite some of our area experts to participate in possibly helping us polish the basic material. We also have had a very generous offer of over 600+ new digital books for our target collection that are not available in the IACL. We are working out the details, so more news on that as it develops. We will need to fold those books into our existing categories, and perhaps even add a few more to our existing collection. Everything will be available via the web, either through us or through the original source, but the stick has limitations. Our current limitations are 8G.

Ideally, we want to automate the process of creating customized bundles – but that is another challenge to be met on another day!