Sarah Zdenek’s Weblog

Even this post is late because I am ill and have been since last Sunday. The one day I tried to go in for hours at WiderNet, I ended up leaving after just a few. More project updates next week.

I worked on creating a template for email correspondence with possible partners.  By the end of the week I had selected a number of AEA contacts in rural Iowa districts and the South Dakota Teach for America Director to send out a first run of information gathering appeals.  As of the writing of this, I have received a response from Ryan Wise, Teach for America, and will have a phone conversation with him in two weeks when he returns from a trip.  I have to admit this is not exactly what I thought I would be doing with this project.  However, in practice I realize that this may well be a minor or even major part of my career as a librarian.  Creating partnerships aids in shared labor when the intentions and needs are similar between groups and possibly grants and other funding.  Digital projects cannot be fully realized and maintained without effort and money.  So, in working through how best to approach possible partners and gain as much from the relationship as is given, I am learning quite a bit about non-profit work in general and digital non-profit work specifically.

We also had a great meeting about creating portals and how to best automate the current system.  WiderNet needs to have help from people out in the field who could create portals on the fly and others to help catalog the eGranary.  I brought up DMOZ as an example of how this has been done by others and Cliff is looking into their description protocols.  I am going to start creating a sample K-12 portal so that, when meeting with partners, we will have an example of what benefits are available.  This will also give us a great opportunity to see what information is needed by different populations and where we have holes in our collection.

The presentation by Kelly Smith this past week was serendipitous.  I have been working on just this type of project planning for the last few weeks at WiderNet.  This last week, I specifically researched on-line open source textbook opportunities for domestic and international distribution.  India has begun to put textbooks on-line and states like Texas and California are looking at doing the same with their state approved textbooks.

I have been looking at the relatively new phenomenon of collaborative, Creative Commons textbooks.  Here individuals take on topics (often referred to as modules) that they feel they have a strong understanding of the subject and create content.  Wikimedia (the parent of Wikipedia) claims their Wikibooks have created over 27,000 textbooks so far.  Here the editing is similar to any other Wikipedia entry.  There are other companies that are doing the same thing as well.  My problems with this latest assignment have been twofold.  One, finding appropriate material for K-12.  Two, developing metadata to describe these “textbooks.”  Each module can have a different author, multiple editors that, in this case, could claim authorship over any or all of the module.  Also, what is the work and is it important to know how many revisions/editions there have been?  Because the sites for the eGranary are only scraped as often as the update formula allows (as determined by the organization itself) what happens if there is a large error committed by an author accidentally or a joker purposefully that could mis-educate a child that may not be caught until months later when the eGranary is updated.  WiderNet does not have a panel of experts reading every page that is scraped and varifying content like a textbook publisher has.  I wrestle with this idea of quality over quantity often with the WiderNet philosophy but, like the rest of the organization, I cannot figure out a better solution than just trying to make as much accessible as possible.

I spent most of my time this week gathering data on who is underserved in the United States in regards to Internet accessibility and bandwidth.  I also looked at the needs of two other possible patron groups: home schooling families and children with special needs.  In rural areas of the United States the level of poverty, lack of Internet and other services and the limitations as to other educational services is the same or sometimes lower than major intercity areas.  With this in mind, I will be looking to create a list of possible grant opportunities and partners that would enable these rural areas and the children, caregivers and teachers who live there access to the eGranary database.

I also attended a training on the eGranary permission protocol and learned about how the database is structured.  Now, when I have resources to add to the database, I will be able to input and correctly categorize each entry.