[Building Sakai] Question about contrib textbook

[Jim Eng]

Hi Sam,

It sounds like you might be using the 2.5.x branch of tbook.  I believe that trunk of textbook has been converted to build with sakai 2.6.x and beyond.  At the moment, tbook trunk is stable.  No changes have been made since the tbook-0.9RC07 tag was made.  I would suggest you use either one of these URL's to check out tbook to build with 2.6.x:

https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/textbook/tbook/tags/tbook-0.9RC07/
https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/textbook/tbook/trunk

The design of tbook includes pages for specifying the textbooks for each course, but that part has not yet been implemented.  At the University of Michigan, textbook selections are made in an external system and imported into CTools through an implementation of the  TextbookProvider interface:

https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/textbook/tbook/tags/tbook-0.9RC07/api/src/java/org/sakaiproject/tbook/provider/TextbookProvider.java

This could be as simple as reading all textbook info for courses from a static file.  Or it could involve reading updates from an external system (as is done at Michigan).  Our idea was to provide a default implementation that reads data from local tables that are populated by additional tool code.

You will also need an implementation of the BookFinder interface to provide metadata about books:

https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/textbook/tbook/tags/tbook-0.9RC07/api/src/java/org/sakaiproject/tbook/logic/BookFinder.java

At Michigan, we get book metadata from OCLC's xISBN service (http://xisbn.worldcat.org/xisbnadmin/index.htm).  We have a contract with OCLC to use this service.  The service is free for small numbers of queries per day, but we anticipated that we would go beyond the limits of the free service regularly, so we worked out a contract with OCLC.  There are other sources of textbook metadata, but if you decide to use xISBN, you could use Michigan's BookFinder impl.

If you run into any problems or have any questions, please feel free to contact us directly. 

HTH.

Jim
   

On Apr 11, 2010, at 11:29 PM, Sam Chow wrote:

> 
> Dear all,
> 
> I would like to install the contrib textbook on a sakai version 2.6.2, i
> download the textbook folder, and modify all the org.sakaiproject version M2
> to 2.6.2 in all pom file. When i try to deploy it, it return some dependency
> missing such as sakai-component:jar:2.6.2 .
> 
> Any thing i need to modify is missing? And what is the use of another folder
> tbook?
> 
> Many Thanks
> Sam Chow
> 
> -----
> Best Regards,
> 
> Sam Chow
> Research Assistant
> Lingnan Unviersity
> Hong Kong
> -- 
> View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Question-about-contrib-textbook-tp28213536p28213536.html
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