benhylau
commented
5 years ago When in conversations with people, I often get into these "ahh there's this article / paper" which I remember a partial title or the name of the author... except there's no Internet and I cannot recall the exact article. I think it'd be cool if there's a searchable offline library on site where I can say "why don't we walk over to the library and print this paper!" I think people will find this a useful resource.
I also wonder if the larger discussion of "local access to digitally archived content" can have some discussion space. Like where you mentioned:
be on-hand (a booth?) for some fraction of the time to help folks look things up and discuss distributed libraries
There may be some shared discussions with @mitra42's idea on https://github.com/dweb-camp-2019/applications/issues/3
In terms of logistics, we are planning an indoor space that should have wired connections to the local mesh. Imagine a table with a couple seats in a large hall with wire drops where you can connect a NAS or a Raspberry Pi tied to an external HDD, where you can also put a laser printer, perhaps put up a schedule of some discussion activities...
is the ability to "just look it up" actually desirable at an event like this? is it an intrusion of outside authority?
I think this is very helpful and as long as the resource is pull-based (searched) rather than pushed onto people, it's not an intrusion at all!
mitra42
bnewbold
I think it would be helpful to provide local access to the "scholarly record": research papers, perhaps books, notable blog posts, etc. This would enable participants to check citations and dig in to knowledge a layer deeper than an encyclopedia. It also provides a convenient content set / corpus for people experimenting with distributed storage and communication systems on-site.
The most basic service to provide is a simple lookup when somebody already knows an identifier (DOI) or title/author, and return a PDF, though an HTTP web interface. More advanced services, which would be progressively harder to provide, are a dedicated lookup station (large monitor, seat, etc; would work if local network is down); print-out services (double-sided; color?); access over multiple protocols; accepting deposits and metadata edits (wiki-style); fulltext search and other rich "discovery" services (eg, "show me the best paper/book about carrot night vision"); additional media types (eg, XML, HTML); expanded coverage of books and web content.
I'm interested in trying to run such a service; it overlaps with the papers archiving work I do at the archive (https://fatcat.wiki). My basic plan would be to run:
Happy to collaborate if others want to bite off some of the more ambitious options! Other brainstorm-y ideas:
Some more thoughts: