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.

Please take the Greenstone User Survey!  10-15 minutes of your time can help us learn more about Greenstone software users and developers. With your help, we will gain a better understanding of Greenstone software and support resource use and satisfaction; in what ways Greenstone users interact with and use the software; and the organizational and technical environments in which Greenstone software is used.

If you work with Greenstone to:
•    Develop digital library collections;
•    Teach about digital libraries;
•    Learn about digital libraries;
•    Develop language interfaces for Greenstone;
•    Develop other functionalities or code for Greenstone;
•    Disseminate or otherwise support use of Greenstone,
You are eligible to participate in this study.

How to participate:
Read information about the survey and your rights as a participant at:
http://greenstonesurvey.wordpress.com/infosheet/.
Then click the link at the bottom of the survey information page to continue to the survey.

In addition to the online survey, a pdf version is also available.
Contact Laura Sheble at [email protected] for a copy of the pdf survey.

Want to do more?
Help us distribute the survey:  Inform other Greenstone software users
and developers about this survey by posting a link to this blog entry
or by sending an email with the information above. Thank you for your help!

The Southern African Greenstone Support Network (SAGSN) consists of many libraries developing digital collections with the aid and assistance of a number of National Centres of excellence. To date the Network has National Centres at libraries in Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. The Support Network would like to include more countries in and beyond the Southern African Region through the establishment of a number of new National Centres. In countries with an eIFL.net presence National Centres usually work closely with their national library consortium.

This Call invites libraries (or related organisations) actively engaged in digitisation efforts and digital libraries who are interested in the possibility of becoming a National Centre, to contact the SAGSN Regional Coordinator, Amos Kujenga ([email protected]), for further discussion.

The closing date for the Call is Friday the 12th of June 2009.

As guiding documents the National Centre Terms of Reference and a Call for Participation are available as downloadable PDFs. The Terms of Reference are the present and future Centres’ touchstones. 

Ian Witten has just returned from giving a workshop on the Greenstone Digital Library Software in Pohnpei, Micronesia. He has given workshops before in faraway places, but this was an extraordinary experience. Pohnpei is a capital city that he’d never heard of before (have you)? It’s little more than a pixel on Google Maps, and on the way from Hawaii his plane landed on atolls uncharted even by Google. Organized by the Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, each of the 18 carefully-selected participants received a laptop to take home with them. They came from Palau, Yap, Chuuk, Guam, Pohnpei, Kosrae, Majuro, and Pago Pago. The hospitality was wonderful, laughter rang throughout the workshop — and the students were extremely dedicated, working into coffee and lunch breaks in a manner unheard of in laid-back tropical islands. In five days we all learned a lot.

In 2008, the University of Waikato a received a Grant from the Mellon Foundation to promote contributions to the Greenstone Digital Library suite which provide significant benefits to higher education, libraries, museums, arts, or nature conservation. The University is using the award to support the Greenstone community of developers and users, particularly in developing countries (see the announcement below).

The first grant of US$ 8,000 has been awarded to Prodigio Consultores in Santiago, Chile, to coordinate the launching of a sustainable, voluntary, not-for-profit Greenstone support network for Latin America. In carrying out this work by end June 2010, Prodigio will:

• identify national coordinators for focal points for promotion of the Greenstone Digital Library software in at least 3 Latin American countries;
• establish contracts engaging each national coordinator to organise a national Greenstone training workshop, provide technical support services for one year and to ensure development and public access to at least one new Greenstone digital library application;
• create a regional coordinating and evaluation committee composed of representatives of the national coordinators and other Latin American experts;
• establish a collaborative portal to inform and facilitate cooperation among Greenstone users in Latin America (including announcement of training events, news about and links to Greenstone collections in the region, FAQs, and documentation on Greenstone in regional languages);
• provide technical assistance to the work of the national coordinators;
• coordinate the work of the regional coordinating and evaluation committee with a view to formally establishing and consolidating the regional support network.

Additional support has been provided to enable Diego Spano, Director of Projects at Prodigio, to undertake a visit to Waikato to familiarise himself with the latest Greenstone developments and to discuss the development of the Latin American network.

Although Prodigio is a commercial company, it will be undertaking this activity on a totally not-for-profit basis. This work will build on the Spanish-language Greenstone discussion list which has been moderated by Prodigio for the past year. Further information can be obtained from Diego Spano.

The Latin American network will join the Greenstone support networks in South Asia (operating since 2006) and Southern Africa (operating since 2007).

We hope to award the remaining Greenstone-Mellon grants by June 2009 in order to meet the deadlines for the use of these funds. Interested parties are referred to the grant announcement:

I am very pleased to announce that the University of Waikato has been awarded US$50,000 for the Greenstone project within the Third Annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (see http:// matc.mellon.org/press-release). This competition is meant “to recognize important organizational contributions to open source projects which currently or potentially provide significant benefits to at least one traditional Mellon constituency (higher education, especially the arts and humanities; libraries; museums; arts organizations; and nature conservation).” We understand that the committee was primarily impressed by Greenstone’s impact in the developing world as testified by many users who supported our candidacy online, thanks to all of you who contributed recommendations.

The University intends to use the award to further the Greenstone community of developers and users, particularly in developing countries. This will involve improving the documentation, making tutorial videos, and stimulating the development of Greenstone capabilities and user groups in developing countries.

As part of this effort we invite proposals from the Greenstone community in developing countries for small grants (US$1000 to US $5000) which will be awarded in 2009 according to the following criteria:

• one-time assistance (not a continuing subvention) for a project which will lead to sustainable follow-up: examples of activity could be organisation of user meetings or training workshops, expert missions for training and advice (particularly exchange of expertise within a given region or country), institutional exchanges or user services;
• priority to regional networks and to countries and institutions in greatest need (normally grants will not available to individuals, but there could be exceptions);
• priority to projects which are partially self-funded or partially funded by third parties.

Detailed proposals should be addressed to John Rose, Research Associate, University of Waikato, who will correspond with the submitting parties as needed to refine their proposals. Awardees will be expected to submit a detailed evaluation report at the conclusion of their projects.

Would you like to have a Greenstone3 server in your pocket? Now you can with our port of the run-time system to Android. Fire-up Greenstone3 on your mobile phone and then access it just like any other Greenstone server, searching and browsing multimedia collections. You can connect to it over a wi-fi network, an ad-hoc wireless network (device-to-device) or via a USB cable.

You may have read about our earlier success in porting Greenstone2 to Apple devices. We have Greenstone2 running on early (3rd to 5th generation) iPods (see details of our demo) and the iPod Touch (see our paper here). Now Greenstone3, our next-generation digital library software, runs on a mobile handset.

Specifically, it runs on an HTC G1 Android-powered mobile phone. Android is a project of the Open Handset Alliance, and is an open platform for mobile devices.

How does it work?

Collections are built on a desktop computer in the same way as with standard Greenstone3. It is the runtime code that we have ported.

Greenstone3 conventionally runs as web-application of a Tomcat web server. However, it’s not tied to Tomcat, and can be used with an alternative web server such as Jetty . Of course, these and other desktop web servers aren’t going to run on a mobile device. Fortunately the people at Webtide have created i-jetty , a port of Jetty to Android, which solved our mobile web server requirements.

Greenstone3 is written in Java, as are Android applications. Normally though, Greenstone3 uses mg++ for indexing and GDBM as its database. Unfortunately both are written in C/C++ which isn’t much help when a totally Java runtime is needed. However, Greenstone3 supports the use of Lucene (indexing) and JDBM (database), both of which are Java. Using these we can build collections such that only Java is required for a fully functional Greenstone3 server.

However Android Java isn’t exactly the same as desktop Java, so some modification of the Greenstone3 runtime source code was required. This mainly relates to as yet unimplemented aspects of Android Java and its limited supported for XML processing. Some workarounds were required because of the limited memory (192Mb RAM) and processor power (528MHz) available on an actual handset.

The runtime is compiled into a JAR file. This and other necessary Java libraries, along with the standard Greenstone3 ‘web’ directory (which includes the collections) is organised into an i-jetty web application directory structure. i-jetty provides a utility to combine this into a WAR file, with Java classes converted into the byte code required by the virtual machine running on the Android device. This is then transferred to the SD card on the phone.

i-jetty is then launched on the phone with Greenstone3 available as a web application and accessible from a web browser by specifying the phone’s IP address and the webapp context as the URL.

At the moment the code is in pre-alpha release state. It works but needs some further debugging and optimization. When it’s ready we’ll make it available separately from the standard Greenstone3 distribution but eventually we’ll integrate it to the Greenstone3 package.

Any enquiries, technical or otherwise, should be sent to [email protected].

Acknowledgement: purchase of the G1 handset was supported by the ICT Science Kudos Award 2008.

I am very pleased to announce that the University of Waikato has been awarded US$50,000 for the Greenstone project within the Third Annual Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration (see http://matc.mellon.org/press-release). This competition is meant “to recognize important organizational contributions to open source projects which currently or potentially provide significant benefits to at least one traditional Mellon constituency (higher education, especially the arts and humanities; libraries; museums; arts organizations; and nature conservation).” We understand that the committee was primarily impressed by Greenstone’s impact in the developing world as testified by many users who supported our candidacy online, thanks to all of you who contributed recommendations.

The University intends to use the award to further the Greenstone community of developers and users, particularly in developing countries. This will involve improving the documentation, making tutorial videos, and stimulating the development of Greenstone capabilities and user groups in developing countries.

As part of this effort we invite proposals from the Greenstone community in developing countries for small grants (US$1000 to US$5000) which will be awarded in 2009 according to the following criteria:

* one-time assistance (not a continuing subvention) for a project which will lead to sustainable follow-up: examples of activity could be organisation of user meetings or training workshops, expert missions for training and advice (particularly exchange of expertise within a given region or country), institutional exchanges or user services;
* priority to regional networks and to countries and institutions in greatest need (normally grants will not available to individuals, but there could be exceptions);
* priority to projects which are partially self-funded or partially funded by third parties.

Detailed proposals should be addressed to John Rose , Research Associate, University of Waikato, who will correspond with the submitting parties as needed to refine their proposals. Awardees will be expected to submit a detailed evaluation report at the conclusion of their projects.

cheers
ian

We are pleased to announce that the Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X and Source distributions of Greenstone v2.81 are now available for download from:

http://www.greenstone.org/download

The main focus has been on multilingual support. Improvements include handling filenames that include non-ASCII characters, accent folding switched on by default for Lucene, and character based segmentation for CJK languages.

This release also features our new installer, which is 100% open source. Previously we had relied on a commercial program for this, which incurred a significant cost in keeping up to date; consequently we decided to develop our own installer, based on the excellent open source installer toolkits already available.

There are many other significant additions in this release, such as the Fedora Librarian Interface (analogous to GLI, but working with a Fedora repository). See the release notes for the complete details. Specific issues fixed in the 2.81 release can be viewed in Greenstone Trac here and here.

This has been a long time coming, thank you for your patience.

As always, please report any problems or bugs to the mailing list.

————–

Thanks to:

John Rose, for help with English GLI help, French translations for GLI and Greenstone.
Maxime Rouast for Greenstone French translations
Celine Guimbertaud for GLI French translations
Yohannes Mulugeta and Abiyot Bayou for Greenstone Amharic translations
Kamal Salih for GLI Arabic translations
Gerhard Riesthuis for Greenstone Dutch translations
Mohan Raj Pradhan for GLI Nepali translations.
Diego Spano for translating the installer’s interface into Spanish.
Xiaofeng Yu for translating the installer’s interface into Mandarin.
Doris Jung for translating the installer’s interface into German.

A paper by four members of our group entitled Running Greenstone on an iPod won the “best demo” prize at the premier international Digital Libraries conference (JCDL), held in Pittsburgh recently.

We had other successes too. Of ten papers submitted by members of our group, 8 were accepted (well above the odds—the overall success rate was 30%). Here’s a slide the Program Chair presented in the opening ceremony breaking submitted papers down by “continent,” which also included New Zealand, as it has more submissions than Africa, South America, and Australia combined. It was a well-received note of humor, and the audience was quite impressed.

The ideas encapsulated in the Greenstone Librarian Interface (GLI) are now available for people working with the Fedora Digital Repository system. Currently the software is checked into the SVN repository — we will produce binaries for this as part of the next general Greenstone release. For now, if you’re interested to try it out, follow the instructions for checking out Greenstone (works with either Greenstone 2 or 3). You will also want to install a version of Fedora.

When you check out the Greenstone Librarian Interface part of the SVN install, you also get all the necessary files for the Fedora Librarian Interface . Once you have the code compiled, where you would usually run ‘gli.sh’ (for Mac or Linux) run ‘fli.sh’. For Windows, it is fli.bat