Post
Workshop Announcement
The On Demand Book Service
As a follow-up to the DLAC workshop, researchers from the Faculty of
Information Studies at the University of Toronto, and Keewaytinook Okimakanak
(KO) have embarked on an initiative to create an On-Demand Book Service
for First Nations communities in Northern Ontario. This service will
build on the power of information and communication technologies (ICTs)
to provide users with access to public domain materials (as well as
possible contributed materials), and allowing the works to be downloaded
and printed. The On-Demand Book Service is modeled under the Internet
Archive Bookmobile initiative, which sought to bring universal access
to human knowledge.
With assistance from K-Net, researchers will identify several geographic
areas and physical locations where the on-demand book service could
reside in Northern Ontario. It is proposed that the same set-up as the
Internet Archive^Òs on-demand book publishing experiment will
be used. This includes: a computer, a printer, a guillotine and a binding
machine. Patrons of the service will be able to choose a work from an
established list, print it, trim it, and bind it. In the end, the work
becomes a book, which the patron can keep and which can be produced
for a minimal amount (the Internet Archives estimated the cost for the
end-user of an average pocket book produced in this fashion to be around
US$1).
Links to ODBS-related materials:
* Designing
an On-Demand Book Service for First Nations Communities in Northern
Ontario -- a working paper presented at the Final CRACIN
Workshop, Montreal, QC. June 20-22, 2007.
* Web versions of the ODBS portal [Prototype
1][Prototype
2]
* CMS
version of the ODBS portal
* Powerpoint presentation on the ODBS presented to Library Archives
Canada (pending).
Workshop
Summary:
An overall summary of the workshop has been drafted,
covering some of the issues that were discussed along with the next
steps that needs to be taken to move forward . Click here
to download the report (you will need Adobe
Acrobat Reader to open the file).
On behalf of the DLAC committee we thank you for visiting the site and being a part of the workshop.
Posted on 10th of March 2006
Overview
Digital
Libraries are "electronic resources and associated technical
capabilities for creating, searching and using information" (Borgman,
1999, p. 234). They are artefacts that are "constructed, collected and
organized, by (and for) a community of users, and [whose] functional
capabilities support the information needs and uses of that community" (id). [Borgman, C. L. (1999). What are digital libraries? Competing visions. Information Processing & Management, 35 (3), 227- 243.]
The Faculty of Information Studies (FIS) at the University of Toronto is partnering with the Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO), a treaty council representing six First Nations communities in Ontario's far north to organize a day-long workshop
on "Digital Libraries for and with Aboriginal communities". The
workshop will be held on Friday November 25th, 2005, from 8:00 am to
4:30 pm (EST). The workshop is devoted to discussing the best possible
models for providing information resources and services to the
communities in the remote areas of Northern Ontario.
The aim is to devise a strategy to create a digital library for
elementary and secondary school students. Such a digital library would
serve all remote and isolated communities in Ontario's far north and
even those outside of the membership of KO. From a research
perspective, the project raises a number of important questions with
regard to the design and delivery of online materials that are
culturally relevant and meaningful to the needs and preferences of
Aboriginal community members from various parts of the province.
The workshop will be a hybrid of physical and virtual meetings with two
main nodes: one at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University
of Toronto, and the other in the
Keewaytinook
Okimakanak (KO) offices . There
will be bridges in Sudbury, Ottawa and other northern communities. The
participants at the various nodes will interact through IP
videoconferencing and via
the Starbak streaming server ( Please click on Tech Support if your facing difficulty in viewing the webcast).
The following organizations provided funding and/or support for the workshop:
- Kuhkenah network (K-Net)
- The Faculty of Information Studies (FIS)
- The Canadian Research Alliance on Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN)
- Research on Information and Communication Technologies with Aboriginal Communities (RICTA)
For more information, please contact the organizers of the workshop:
- Nadia Caidi (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto, nadia.caidi@utoronto.ca)
- Brian Walmark (Policy Analyst and Research Director at the Keewaytinook Okimakanak Research Institute, brianwalmark@knet.ca).