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!