Hesperian Online Digital Library
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Description
The Hesperian Online Digital Library project builds on Hesperian Foundation's efforts to offer open, multilingual access to their community handbooks, such as Where There Is No Doctor/Donde No Hay Doctor. The main objectives of this one-year pilot are to build a functioning online digital library of community health materials for Tamil and English speakers and to use the library as a testbed to address several important research issues in the area of multilingual machine translation and user access. The project represents a collaboration between the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), Hesperian Foundation, and graduate and undergraduate students of the University of California, Berkeley.
Status
The project began in September 2007! Check out our initial prototype.
Technical Plan
Content. Initially, the project aims to include about 500 digitized pages (or about one book) and corresponding audio recordings of Hesperian materials in English and in Tamil. The materials will be selected from several community health handbooks, including Where There Is No Doctor, which is described by staff at the World Health Organization as “arguably the most widely-used public health manual in the world . . . a text that has meant survival for thousands in the Third World since the early 1970s.”
Interface. The navigable interface will be built using [http:/www.greenstone.org | Greenstone], open source software specifically designed to create and manage digital libraries. By coding digital materials in XML metadata, we will facilitate future web-based use of these materials, which are already generating tremendous interest: Since posting downloadable .pdf versions of our books, visits to the Hesperian Foundation website have tripled to 600,000 hits per month.
Research goals. The main task of the project is to create a multilingual, accessible interface to Hesperian materials with the potential to be effective in providing health information that is culturally appropriate and truly relevant to the worldwide audience that Hesperian serves. In addition to providing a testbed for an English/Tamil XML version of Hesperian materials, the project will explore online support for Hesperian partners to collaborate and edit the digital materials.
Project Team
Hesperian
- Sarah Shannon
- Todd Jailer
- Zena Herman
- Tawnia Litwin
UC Berkeley
- Simon Tan - UI design
- Simon's Ruby on Rails class project group
http://rorclass-fall07.pbwiki.com/Hesperian+Digital+Library+Project
(To look and edit the RoRClass wiki, use the password "ror")
http://hesperian.rorclass.org
- John Canny
ICSI
Internal Documents
(only for project team)
