Content repositories
| Philosophy |
| Creating Content |
| Curating Content |
| Educational ideas |
| Activity ideas |
| Software ideas |
| Hardware ideas |
| Help Translating |
| Library |
| Content network |
| Repositories |
| Collections |
| modify |
By distributing laptops and school servers with learning materials on them, and a global index of content that can be used with no modification on the laptops, OLPC is developing a network of digital libraries and collections in a number of languages.
(see also: content ideas, sharing your content with OLPC, and content rating).
Large archives
- Free media collections : Flickr, Wikimedia Commons
- Music : Freesound, Free Music Project
- Texts: Project Gutenberg, Google Scholar, Wikipedia;
- Stories: ICDL, other children's pdfs
- Language: WiktionaryZ / OmegaWiki, Dicologos and Universal dictionary system
- Reference collections: the Humanity Development Library, [www.widernet.org/digitallibrary/ eGranary]
Tools are being developed for identifying and culling subsets of large repositories. Small subsets will be needed for pre-installation of choice material on the laptops themselves; larger subsets will still need curating to pick out material suitable for the laptop's audiences; classification and categorization; and checks to avoid unbalance or repetition. Most content will need internationalization.
Specific projects and collections
- The World Digital Library project
- Wikijunior, WikiHow
- OurStories project, with Story Corps, UNICEF, and Google - capturing local stories
- Book scanning and digitization:
- Children's picturebooks, with support from ICDL
- Public domain materials, with archival support from the Internet Archive
- Other local cultural materials, with support from the World Digital Library
Proposed implementation
The head page for a curriculum or cohesive set of content is just an HTML page. It can have any text interspersed in it. The document should have a tag in the header: <link rel="olpc.content_bundle" href="sitemap.xml">.
The sitemap is a Google Sitemap XML file, a simple enumeration of a set of URLs. Unlike Google's restrictions, the URLs do not have to live "on" the site where the sitemap is located -- they may cross domains. Embedded content (like images) do not have to be enumerated, but any linked content should be enumerated (for instance, if you link to a movie file from one of the documents).
Note that this head document can be constructed by anyone, and need not be hosted where the original material is located. Multiple head documents can refer to the same content, representing multiple versions of the curriculum, different target audiences, etc.
A document may contain multiple <link> tags, representing an aggregation of curricula. For instance, a teacher version of a curriculum would include the student version (the sitemap from that version) plus another sitemap enumerating all the documents intended just for the teacher.
The head page represents the collection. It may contain any text, and no special restrictions or interpretation is made of that text. The browser will detect this link tag, and when the student visits the page will offer to pre-fetch the entirety of the content. The pre-fetched content will appear to be at the same URL as it was originally, but will be served from the local cache. Additionally the school server may use this to cache data.
The student may manage their pre-fetched content, which takes up local space and may need to be purged. The head page and the head page's title represents the content in these situations.
The content may link to other documents not enumerated in the sitemap. These may not be available, since they have not been prefetched. At that time the browser should offer to fetch the content when the laptop is able to find that content, and optionally notify the student of the availability of the content. The laptop may seek that content on other nearby laptops, the school server, or the wider internet. The content will be pre-fetched at that time. An option may be provided to do deeper pre-fetching (e.g., fetching down one line, or down two links into the content).
Use cases
Conceptually, a content repository could be used in a variety of ways: to publish and share new material, to collaborate on material development over time (synchronizing online and offline contributions to a shared document or project), to search for and download material, to distribute and cache from large collections that can't be contained on one machine or at one school. For more, see the talk page.
Content rating
Simple ratings can be done
- via a matrix of subject areas and reading levels,
- via a group rating system where anyone can affiliate with a rating group and apply their shared guidelines and ratings to materials