We presented both a web solution as well as a localized USB stick solution containing 2000 public domain books at the conference. You can read more about the event here, and you can check out our web solution in the Rural Design Collective UI Lab. When we first started this project, our goal was to make public domain books more accessible and appealing to kids. Technology in this space is progressing rapidly, so it was fun to balance innovation with a well-defined set of deliverables. That is what makes working the Web so interesting – there is always something new and challenging to learn.

We have a lot of ideas regarding the next steps for our project (and our program), and we plan to implement them. We will be releasing our documentation and code in the next month (everything will be available for download), including a roadmap of the next steps for this particular project. We are very excited about the Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS), but just did not have enough time to work it out this season. We may work it in as an Extra Credit project this winter as we are eager to get set up as a catalog so we can hit the ground running next summer, adding more books and metadata to our collection. We have 600+ digital public domain books that were donated to our program by the Boston Public Library in support of our program (if you were wondering what the gray book icons are in our user interface, they represent placeholder categories for books that were donated by BPL).

The future looks bright! We are planning for next season and working out long-term goals for the Rural Design Collective. We already have eager candidates for mentees, a list of potential Friends of the RDC, a lot of interest, and many opportunities for projects. We will be spending the winter months on outreach and applying for grants. As always, we will share what we learn here.

Steven and Scotty have been working together to create a completely localized version of the collection for the sticks using the new genCollectionInterface tool. The biggest hurdle to overcome is presenting the user interface initially when the stick is inserted into the XO, and delivering the metadata before the book is opened in the Journal. In the meantime, we also developed an online version of the user interface that utilizes a streamlined version of the Internet Archive bookreader (also known as the embeddable bookreader). This bookreader interface works amazingly well on the XO and fits neatly on the screen. We also optimized the collection interface for viewing on the XO – we strongly encourage you to view it on a little green machine if you can (it looks a bit bare in a web browser – but wonderful on the XO … see the screenshots below!). We still have a bit of tweaking to do, but we are quite pleased with the results!

Additional Screenshots: [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ]. We worked diligently to provide an “XO-friendly” interface that accommodates the native elements in the Sugar UI. We are still tweaking some navigational issues, and resolving screen resolution on the XO – but we are pleased with the results!

It is possible to generate either version of the user interface using the genCollectionInterface tool with minor modifications to the code. Right now, we are trying to reach consensus as a team on how much crossover there should be between the online and local versions.

Levi has polished up his public domain icon set, creating one that is Sugar-friendly. We are exploring how to finesse the resolution in Sugar, given the fact that the XO browser renders the pages using 134 DPI. We are also researching to see if there are any standard naming conventions for Sugar icons so we can appropriately name and format the icons for the various states (on, off, hover) so developers can get right to work. We invite other Sugar developers to use these icons in their applications to represent categories of public domain books, and we will be improving the collection in the future – including giving developers an outlet for feedback so we can improve the set. This will also be explained in our documentation. Stay tuned!

Hello! After a brief respite to organize a phenomenal art show and enjoy the changing seasons, we are back in action for the latest work from the Rural Design Collective! We learned from our demos that we gave at our Launch Party and have been ironing out a few bugs based on feedback.

After much deliberation, we have decided to package our previous summer work into a new tool called the “Collection Interface Generator” (genCollectionInterface), a python application developed by Scotty Auble. We think it is exciting in that it works on the XO plus it is accessible to any person interested in creating a localized collection of public domain books. For a sneak peek, you can check out the ongoing work we are doing in the UI Lab. The pages were generated using the program which made it easy to create of custom collection based on our UI work. The metadata for the tooltips came from a .csv metadata file that Steven McKenzie created using Internet Archive advanced search, and the covers were downloaded using the Open Library API. It is a work in progress – we will be tweaking the navigation and other UI details – but we think it is really starting to come together. Our release in October will be accompanied by documentation to explain the Collection Interface Generator, as well as additional information behind our overall concept and method which has developed over time during the 2009 Summer Mentoring Program.

Levi’s work on the icon collection is outstanding – he has developed a versatile set of pictographs that work in a broad range of visual settings. This is the hallmark of a strong icon set, and a great basis of images to release into the public domain. This will be documented along with our code.

The primary usability issue that we are encountering is how to load the DjVu books into the XO Journal as fluidly as possible. There is an interstitial step when the DjVu file is loaded onto the XO and transferred to the Journal that needs to be populated with metadata in order not to disrupt the user experience (you can see this screen here from the GIAB activity). One solution we are exploring is using the embeddable bookreader from the Internet Archive. This version of the bookreader works well on the XO and enables us to emphasize collections which is central to our theme – the only drawback is that it uses JPEG2 files which was not the format we agreed upon for the SoaS solution. We can provide links to the books at the Archive as an alternative format, however, for users with an Internet connection. We will be solving that problem in the weeks ahead – Stay tuned!

We had an incredibly productive week at RDC headquarters this week, working remotely and on-site. James Simmons, author of the View Slides 8 and Get Internet Archive Books 2 (GIAB) Activities for Sugar contributed his considerable knowledge and expertise in this area. Via email, we brainstormed the best approach for making these books accessible – what we are trying to do is unique, in that we are trying to provide a completely offline solution so that children without an Internet connection can enjoy these books. The GIAB program that Jim has written is the online equivalent of what we are trying to do. Ideally, we would like to author our own Activity, but it just makes sense to build on a good code base and tap into a knowledgeable resource. That is how the Internet and open source works.

We have learned that it is not feasible to create a content bundle with too many items because it simply overloads the memory of the XO when it attempts to load all of the contents of the index into the Journal. As a matter of fact, 5 – 20 MB is the recommended bundle size, which is ridiculous when you are dealing with the DjVu or PDF format (Epub, of course, is another kettle of fish – but we will get to that later). There could only be 1-2 books per bundle which (needless to say) would make browsing the collection quite difficult. So, we are looking into methods to either extract a single book from a bundle or store them on the stick as individual files using GIAB as the interface to navigate the collection. Jim even suggested that what we are creating aren’t technically bundles and should perhaps have a different name altogether – such as “Children’s Library Archive”. Jim created a branch for us on github and we will be taking a close look at his code to see what is possible.

We are also making great progress on the web user interface and that will begin to come together in the next week or so. Levi has been developing mockups for browsing the collections, and creating an icon set reflecting the different categories. We want to make it as easy as possible for a user to view the book online or download and install the book onto their XO. We are also looking at AJAX libraries and the best tool to collect the metadata – Open Library API versus Internet Archive Advanced Search.

We view all of this as a work in progress – and have created plenty of work to challenge us in mentoring programs to come!

This week, the RDC indulged a bit, and spent #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday tinkering and upgrading our XOs to Sugar 8.2.0. We encountered a bit of difficulty upgrading directly to Sugar 8.2.1, but were successful with an earlier build (767). A couple of the laptops we delivered to the local area were two years old (part of the initial G1G1 campaign) and running the original version of Sugar, so they were definitely due an upgrade.

Two more local laptops were retrieved belonging to local families. Many thanks to Nathan Malamud and Vilma McCutcheon for contributing their laptops to our project. Nathan is our lead beta-tester and videographer for our 2009 summer program. Vilma is an original “Friend of the Rural Design Collective,” and was a Bookmobilista when the Internet Archive BookMobile made its maiden voyage to Oregon in 2007. We have a pretty cool announcement to make relating to that in the next week or so …

And speaking of “Friends of the Rural Design Collective,” we want to welcome Roy Rousseau to the club. Roy has kindly provided us with the funds to purchase our sticks for the Sugar-on-a-Stick part of the project. Thank you, Roy! We will be announcing more friends over the coming weeks.

In other news, Levi is working on the web interface for the IACL-4-OLPC collection (and we are currently brainstorming a better name for our bundle, so consider “IACL-4-OLPC” a code name), while Steven is going the extra mile on the upgrade front, and souping up a couple of the XOs so we can experiment with EPUB. This will require an upgrade to Read 7.0, which was just released this week by Sugar Labs. We can’t wait to give it a whirl!

This week it was Scotty’s turn to be on the road, so in the absence of our DA (Designated Adult), the RDC crew did some experimenting with Steven’s new auto-downloader program and looked at how to create a collection for the XO. We ran a few tests downloading some of the subject groups in our target collection – and the program is working splendidly! We also spent some time looking at the new S3 API recently released by the Internet Archive as yet another alternative means of downloading the IACL collection (in addition to the Open Library Bulk Access Downloader). We plan to use our auto-downloader – but it is always good to have a backup plan.

Ideally, we want to make the creation of these bundles as automated as possible, and extend the ability of the downloader to retrieve materials from any source so anyone who wants to can start creating bundles for the OLPC XO. Right now, Steven is exploring to see if he can get his auto-downloader to create the bundles according to the structure format outlined on the OLPC wiki, auto-generating the necessary directories and library files. He is also developing a roadmap of pre- and post-launch deliverables for his app so he can continue development beyond the RDC Summer Mentoring program. We plan to host his code and continue to help him with his quest! Levi is pitching in with the first order of design business: creating a custom icon that will represent our IACL-4-OLPC bundle like the ones at wiki.laptop.org.

We also brainstormed the idea of downloading the books in bulk (IACL-complete) as well as in the organized sub-collections (IACL-by-topic) as represented in our target collection. As we mentioned previously, our target collection is essentially a subset of the IACL. This target collection was also used in another open source project called the Virtual Shelf, created by two talented developers from the Berkeley School of Information (their prototype application only runs in Mozilla Firefox 3. If you cannot view it, you can read more about it in the developer’s master thesis). We want to retain the meta-information if possible (at this point, just the sub-collection information from the Internet Archive), but also give others the ability to build their collection from scratch. The idea is to pass this collection on to others – not just the OLPC, but to other folks with XOs – and they should be responsible for their own librarianship. We do want to do as much as possible to help get them started.

Speaking of passing on the collection … we will be picking up some of the area XOs this week. First stop: our friends at the Port Orford Library!

Greetings from Rebecca Malamud on behalf of the Rural Design Collective! Apologies for this delayed #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday report – I am on the road again visiting friends and family – but always in touch with the RDC crew in Oregon via Skype and email during the trip. We are starting to make real progress on the IACL-4-OLPC project!

Steven has successfully downloaded his first book with his new auto-downloader program! Written fully in python, it can retrieve a user-defined list of books and specify what directory the files are being saved to. Scotty Auble, our Development Mentor for the IACL-4-OLPC project, states that this differs from the Bulk Access Downloader available from Open Library in that it uses straight python urlib calls instead of relying on linux/unix wget commands. We are investigating if there is a way to still use rate limiting to decrease the load to the IA servers when downloading the books. Since we are only dealing with a subset of the Internet Archive Children’s Library (2,000 out of 3,322 books), and the examples set forth on the Open Library blog are 700K+, we are inclined to believe that impact on the network will be marginal. But we plan to check with folks at the Archive just because it is good manners .

Steven, who has code-named his application “Oghams Prayer”, has set some new personal goals on the project – he wants to (1) auto-detect file formats in the list so it does not have to be hard-coded, (2) develop a means to sort and file books based on topic (we built our collection based on the IACL Tag Cloud so we would like to retain that meta-information, another reason to not just do a wget), and (3) make the application extensible so it can download books from multiple sources, not just the IACL. He also plans to develop a simple user interface, and release the code as open source. The RDC team will be helping him with the rollout of his new application!

Levi has wrapped up his first draft of our DjVu Memory Chart – and mastered some new CSS and HTML skills in the process. Ever the skeptics, we were curious to see how much the DjVu memory per page varied on different types of books. It is obvious that this can vary a great deal depending on the content, so it will be interesting to see how much memory the IACL books we have targetted will actually occupy. We are estimating that an 8GB memory stick will be more than enough. We do plan on finessing our sample collection a bit, both in terms of design and content, so it might provide a useful guide for someone else planning to build a collection in the DjVu format.

It was a busy and successful week! Next up: downloading our IACL collection and exploring the EPUB format! We also have a special surprise announcement that will be revealed at a later date. Stay tuned to the RDC!

The Rural Design Collective was recently granted a hardware donation from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation. Six XO laptops were granted to us through the OLPC Contributors Program — and we will be creating XO bundles of public domain books for kids from the Internet Archive Children’s Library! These six computers will be returned at the end of the program and the IACL books will be distributed to other XO laptops. OLPC has a group of volunteers assisting in the librarianship, and we will also be documenting our progress on the web so other people can benefit. It is an exciting program, and we are honored to be involved.