greenstone digital library software

An introduction

1. GrEENSTONE DIGITAL LIBRARY SOFTWARE AN INTRODUCTION Bacalzo,Sharon MARIANO,nENITA

2. The Greenstone Digital library Software provides a way of building and distributing digital library collections, opening up new possibilities for organizing information and making it available over the internet or on CD-ROM. Developed by the New Zealand Digital Library Project (www.nzdl.org) at the University of Waikato. Distributed in co-operation with UNESCO and Humanities Library Project, Romania

3. New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato Greenstone software grew out of this project, and this initiative has been endorsed by the Communication Sub-Commission of the New Zealand National Commission for UNESCO as part of New Zealand's contribution to UNESCO's programme.

4. The aim of the Greenstone software is to empower users, particularly in universities, libraries, and other public service institutions, to build their own digital libraries

5. Digital libraries are radically reforming how information is disseminated and acquired in UNESCO's partner communities and institutions in the fields of education, science and culture around the world, and particularly in developing countries.

6. GDLS:Some Facts CURRENT VERSION: 2.82 and 3.03 Available from http://www.greenstone.org Software suite for building ,maintaining ,and distributing digital library collections. Comprehensive , open-source Distribution and promotion partners; UNESCO Human Info NGO ,Belgium

7. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization The dissemination of educational, scientific and cultural information throughout the world, and particularly its availability in developing countries, is central to UNESCO's goals as pursued within its intergovernmental Information for All Programme, and appropriate, accessible information and communication technology is seen as an important tool in this context.

8. The Human Info NGO, Belgium This project works with UN agencies and other NGOs, and has established a worldwide reputation for digitizing documentation of interest to human development and making it widely available, free of charge to developing nations and on a cost-recovery basis to others

9. GDLS:HISTORY 1995 -Digitl Library of Computer Science Technical Reports. Its established by New Zealand Digital Library. 1997 -Decision to use GPL(General Public License);name: Greenstone adopted ;work with Human Info NGO to produce humanitarian CD-ROM’s. 1998 April - First CD-ROM collection released: Humanity Development Library 1998 Aug .- Greenstone.org website established

10. 1999- collection established 2000 April - Greenstone mailing list started 2000 Aug .-Formally established cooperative effort with UNESCO and Human Info NGO 2000 Nov .- Distribute software on Source Forge 2002 April- Development of Greenstone3 2002 March- Official opening of the Niupepa collection, development of Greenstone Librarian Interface 2002 June- First UNESCO Greenstone CD-ROM 2003- a Java development that became known as the Greenstone Librarian Interface

11. 2005 Nov .-Initial release of Greenstone3 2006 April - Greenstone Support Group for South Asia launched

12. Builds and distributes digital library collections Full-text document search and display Multi-platform support Web-based user interface Highly customizable Document collections can be exported to CD-ROMs Can be used for archiving

13. Collections A typical digital library built with Greenstone will contain many collections, individually organized—though they bear a strong family resemblance. Easily maintained, collections can be augmented and rebuilt automatically.

14. Overview of Greenstone Document Formats Source documents come in a variety of formats, and are converted into a standard XML form for indexing by “plugins.” Plugins distributed with Greenstone process plain text, HTML, WORD and PDF documents, and Usenet and E-mail messages

15. Multimedia documents Collections can contain text, pictures, audio and video. Non-textual material is either linked into the textual documents or accompanied by textual descriptions (such as figure captions) to allow full-text searching and browsing.

16. Figure 1 Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the “Demo” collection supplied with the Greenstone software. Almost all icons are clickable. Several icons appear at the top of almost every page.

17. Figure 2 shows a document in the demo collection. Beside the photograph is a table of contents: the entry in bold face marks where you are, in this case Introduction and Summary —Section 1 of the chosen book. This table is expandable: click on the folders to open them or close them.

18. Making Greenstone Collections The simplest way to build new collections is to use Greenstone’s “librarian” interface (GLI). This allows you to collect sets of documents, import or assign metadata, and build them into a Greenstone collection. It supports five basic activities, which can be interleaved but are nominally undertaken in this order:

19. Making Greenstone Collections 1. Copy documents from the computer’s file space, including existing collections, into the new collection. Any existing metadata remains “attached” to these documents. Documents may also be gathered from the web through a built-in mirroring facility. 2. Enrich the documents by adding further metadata to individual documents or groups of documents.

20. Making Greenstone Collections 3. Design the collection by determining its appearance and the access facilities that it will support. 4. Build the collection using Greenstone. 5. Preview the newly created collections, which will have been installed on your Greenstone home page as one of the regular collections.

21. GLI – Start a new collection

22. GLI – Importing metadata