The Greenstone website www.greenstone.org has been updated and simplified. The updated version is also now available in the GTI (Greenstone Translation Interface) for translation.

The very start of last week still required more work on the scripts that would handle translations made in Google’s Translator Toolkit. A couple of additional scripts were written.

Thereafter and until yesterday, the work has been mostly centred on GS3’s usersDB:

• getting the output of txt2usersDB to work as input to usersDB2txt and viceversa as well as allowing txt2usersDB to run in append mode,
• creating a new program to modify a user’s details in the DB which then gets called by the new targets config-user and config-admin (for setting the admin password) in build.xml
• getting the releasekit to update the admin password where the user provides this

There were a few questions in the mailing list that required some investigating, and today I finally got round to looking at getting Java to write out a bit of javascript that was previously done in XSLT where it looked unsightly and verbose. Unfortunately, I couldn’t test it when I tried out the Document Structure Editor. I got a blank section and could not type into this the new gslib:langfrag element that I was meant to test.

Instead, I decided to write some handy instructions into the Wiki’s Greenstone 2 FAQ which will help explain how to do some common tasks. The questions added to the FAQ are on how to manually build collections, how to get better error reporting in GLI, how to run GLI in debug mode, how to launch, use and copy from the DOS prompt, how to launch Windows Explorer and where to find the Windows key.  From experience, these instructions will be particularly helpful when answering Mailing List questions, as Greenstone users can be referred to these new FAQ items, armed with which they will then be better equipped to help us in the debugging process.

We are pleased to announce that an overview of results from the 2009 Greenstone User and Developer survey is available online at: http://greenstonesurvey.wordpress.com/greenstone-user-and-developer-survey-results/.

Through the survey, we were able to gather information from a geographically dispersed group of organizations and individuals who use Greenstone Digital Library Software. A primary component of the survey focused on how support resources are used and how current resources meet user needs.

The overview includes results from all major sections of the survey, which were the following:

• Background information (modes of use and basic use demographics);
• User Satisfaction;
• Support Mechanisms and Resources;
• Organizational Contexts;
• Technical Environments (Version Use and OS);
• Collections and Audiences; and
• Developers.

We’d like to thank respondents for participating in the survey and sharing information about their Greenstone experience!

We are pleased to announce the publication of the Second Edition of How to Build a Digital Library.

The Second Edition is a major rewrite, including new material on multimedia, metadata, internationalisation and the roles that people take in digital libraries. The book is divided into two sections: Part I on Principles and Practices and Part II on the Greenstone Digital Library Software. This division allows the book to be used for general digital library courses (using any software) and frees Part II to provide the most detailed description available of the Greenstone software suite.

The book website has lots of supporting material including: samples of the Preface and Chapter 1, an online Appendix on markup and XML, and all of the Figures and Tables.

Witten, I.H., Bainbridge, D. & Nichols, D.M. (2010) How to Build a Digital Library, Second Edition. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.

More details at Amazon.com and WorldCat.

The Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X and Source distributions of Greenstone v2.80
are now available for download from our sourceforge page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenstone or via our download page.

There is a patch to the 2.80 release, which is a newer version of the main.cfg file with additional configuration for several new languages: malayalam, marathi, tamil, telugu, bulgarian, and sinhalese. To install the patch, download the new main.cfg by right clicking this link and select “save link as” (or “save target as”). Then replace the old main.cfg, which is in the ‘etc’ folder of your Greenstone installation.

New documentation is available at the documentation section of the Greenstone support for South Asia website. Three new documents have been added entitled Greenstone: A Beginner’s Guide, WINISIS to Greenstone: A Guide and Creating Digital Archives with Winisis.

Interested in the history of the Greenstone project? Here is a brief account.

There is now a Greenstone documentation Wiki that brings together all Greenstone documentation, including manuals, FAQ, tutorial exercises (with sample files), example collections, teaching material, and much more. Please help us with this documentation project; here’s how.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has produced an excellent self-instructional module on Digitization and Digital Libraries, which includes a unit on Greenstone.

Building collections on a remote Greenstone server. This scheme allows users to augment and edit collections that are held on a remote Greenstone server. Users work with a modified version of the Greenstone Librarian Interface but do not need to have Greenstone running locally. Multiple users can collaborate on the same collection (though not at the same time). Here are details of an experimental version that you can download (En Español).