Library

Introduction

The Library activity will be an activity for browsing books and media in Sugar. This should provide an intuitive way to search and browse through different kinds of text and media, including granular reference works, classical texts, image galleries, audio books, and videos. It should display rich information about highly collaborative materials, with ongoing updates, version #s, and dozens of authors.

The activity should make it easy to search for and request new materials for the library from outside sources (international digital libraries, regional or national repositories, the local mesh). It should provide a way to publish new material for others to access. And its infrastructure should allow users to change its layout and what kinds of data it displays.

Purpose and Goals

An intuitive interface for finding media

The Library should provide a layer of abstraction on top of the available reading, editing, and searching activities. It should offer a single place to look for information and media, though there may be separate text-readers, video-viewers, audio-players, and editors for each of these materials.

Through the default interfaces, we can suggest some of the useful metadata that can be filtered up to the highest levels of indexing and browsing.

Initial targets

The simplest initial targets are a library of image-light books, in text or crossmark; a subset of these available as audiobooks; 5000 encyclopedia entries; 1000 dictionary terms, with words in 10 languages; a library of images, each with short metadata strings and sources; and a set of short videos.