[vox] Dixon Public Library Kiosk

[Richard Crawford]

Michael Dunham said:
> Heh - despite all the good jokes in this thread there are some
> interesting thoughts. I have several friends in Dixon and some family.
> The town is at least 70% Spanish speaking.

30%, actually.  ;-)  We do have the highest high school dropout rate for
any town our size in California, though.  And our city's population swells
each harvest season as the number of migrant workers, usually Mexican
Americans, expands and contracts with the agricultural seasons.

About a year ago, the Library commissioned a "needs study" to see how we
could better serve the community.  Lots of useful and interesting
information came out of it: like the 30% Spanish speaking population, the
fact that while the town is only 9 square miles in size (or thereabouts,
possibly 20), the district that the library serves is something like 120
square miles, and so on.

One major issue is the fact that our OPAC vendor will only support Windows
desktop systems.  The catalog is web-based, and I've connected to it and
used it just fine with FireFox under Linux, but there is a desktop
component that will only work on Windows.


>If the kiosk is to be built,
> it should have both Spanish and English interfaces. And, as one little
> answer to the question she asked for her Spanish speaking users try:
> http://www.unixmexico.org I am a member http://www.cofradia.org
> http://www.red-libre.org http://www.linux.org.mx
> http://www.bsdcoders.org There are more - these are just some of the
> currently active ones. The reason to bring this up is in Mexico, open
> source is still pushing hard to gain a foothold. The president of Mexico
>  uses it for his own website and is active in pushing the idea but the
> companies are stuck on the idea that if it isn't from a big US or global
>  brand, it probably isn't any good. UNAM - one of the major universities
>  in Mexico is active in advocating open source and most of the members
> of  these organizations are grads or students. It is something to
> support  among young Latinos. I have tried to help many with Windows
> based  computers that they have purchased at great personal expense to
> communicate with their families and often cannot get to operate well
> because there is little available to them in Spanish. The organizations
> above represent a resource that can fill these gaps pretty well. Mike

I hadn't thought about the possibility of a Spanish interface to the
kiosk.  That would be an excellent idea.


On
>  Tue, May 18, 2004 at 06:50:06AM -0700, Richard Crawford wrote:
>
>>>
>>> "Unix, eh?" she sniffed disdainfully.  "No one uses Unix!"
>>
>>
>
> Oy. Where to begin with how wrong that is!!!?
>
> -bill!
>
> --__--__--
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> vox mailing list
> vox@lists.lugod.org
> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox


-- 
Sláinte,
Richard S. Crawford (AIM: Buffalo2K)
http://www.mossroot.com   http://www.stonegoose.com/catseyeview
"It is only with our heart that we can see clearly.  What is essential is
invisible to the eye."  --Antoine de Saint Exupery