A new greenstone mailing list has been set up for users in the Southern Africa sub-region.

The address is: [email protected]

Renate Morgenstern, Head of Technical Services and Systems at the University of Namibia Library and the sub-regional coordinator for the Greenstone pilot project for Southern Africa, says:

“This is a test of the Greenstone users discussion list which has been set up by the University of Namibia Library in its role as sub-regional centre within the project.

“All Greenstone users in Southern Africa are invited to address their technical problems to this list, for which I will be the moderator. We are looking forward to your active participation on this list in both submitting and responding to queries. Queries which cannot be answered by the list members will be forwarded to the Greenstone team in New Zealand and the response will be given back on this list.”

DL Consulting are pleased to announce that the redesigned Papers Past has now been officially released. Papers Past is a collection of 19th and early 20th century newspapers belonging to the National Library of New Zealand. The new site is a complete redesign, and is based on Greenstone. DL Consulting have been working on it with the National Library of New Zealand since mid-2006.

Read more at the DL Consulting Blog.

The developers’ section of this website has been launched. This gives greenstone contributors access to a more extensive and more integrated set of online development tools.

These tools include greenstone trac, our new bug tracking system and source code browser, greenstone svn, our source code repository, the greenstone wiki, the home-base for greenstone documentation, and the greenstone mailing lists.

Programmers, language maintainers, document writers, feature requesters, and anyone else who wants to help with greenstone development should register as a developer. Once you are registered, you use a single username and password to access all of the greenstone tools.

Please post a comment if you have questions, comments or suggestions. Happy development!

For some time now the Waikato team has been experimenting in the lab with multimedia capabilities for digital libraries. Thanks to funding from the New Zealand Foundation for Research Science and Technology (FRST) this will now go “main stream” in the Greenstone project. The research programme, which spans the next four years, includes content analysis for images, audio and video, with specialisations for digitized newspapers and music. From this analysis, enriched media content can be stored and utilised in the digital library.

We also, at this stage, predict a stronger role played by AJAX in the development of client-side interfaces to access this media rich content in Greenstone. Veronica’s realistic electronic books is one such existing example. Tangible software outcomes from the research — for instance, video streaming playback that exploits a suite of video processing capabilities such as keyframe identification — will go into the Greenstone code base, managed through an extension mechanism.

Veronica Liesaputra won the “Best Demo” prize at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Vancouver, Canada (19-22 June 2007) for her work on realistic electronic books. To see some of the beautiful books that she has produced, visit nzdl.org/books. To see them in a Greenstone collection, look here. (You switch can switch this facility on in the Preferences menu. To make the book option available, switch on HTMLPlug’s tidy_html option.)

I am planning to conduct these Greenstone workshops:

9 July 2007 Kuching, Malaysia: One-day workshop (see http://cita07.org)

19-20 Sept 2007 New York City: Introductory and One-Day Workshops (contact Anthony Troncale, atroncale [at] metro.org

1-5 Oct 2007 University of Namibia: 5-day course (contact John Rose, john.rose1 [at] free.fr)

10 Dec 2007 Hanoi, Vietnam: One-day workshop at ICADL (see http://icadl2007.vista.gov.vn/)

We just finished a very successful UNESCO-sponsored 4-day workshop at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji.

Planet Greenstone, our Greenstone news aggregator, has been launched and can be found at planet.greenstone.org. Actually this is a re-release; it has been available as part of the main greenstone.org website for the last few weeks, but we are re-releasing it as an independent webpage.

Please contact me ([email protected]) to have your blog feed added to our “river of news”.

A new pilot project to introduce Greenstone in Southern Africa has begun, with support from the Koha foundation in the US (not connected with the library software of the same name). The University of Namibia Library in Windhoek will be the sub-regional coordinating centre. A one-week training course will be held there with participation from three national centres — probably university libraries in Lesotho, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Courses will also be run at these national centres, and an international specialist will visit them to help with local Greenstone applications. Waikato and DLConsulting staff are volunteering their time to get this initiative off the ground.