After a lot more testing, discovering bugs, fixing bugs and further testing, we’ve finally generated our 2nd release candidate for Greenstone 2.84. This time, there’s also a binary for the MacOS (tested on Leopard).

Most of the bugs this time round (after Release Candidate 1) had to do with dynamically linked libraries on the MacOs, getting the new document plugins from Greenstone Extensions to work when the Greenstone server is on a remote machine, Imagemagick processing JPEG2000 images on Linux machines, and fixing some issues around installing Greenstone on Windows in a path containing spaces.

Things seem to look good so far (but we’d appreciate independent confirmation of it), so if you haven’t already, do grab a copy and try it out. And tell us about your discoveries: any difficulties, bugs or other insights, so that we can make the final release of Greenstone 2.84 perfect.

Greentone 2.84 has cool new features, including the long-awaited ability to process docx and other new Office formats, as well as recent versions of PDF documents. These features are available as extensions to Greenstone, for which the details can be found in the Release Notes.

Download the Greenstone 2.84 RC2 from the Snapshots page.

The Greenstone wiki page 2.84 Release Notes has information on installation, running, where to get the new Greenstone extensions and more.

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. 

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.

There will be a 4-day Greenstone Workshop at the University of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) on 12-15th May 2008. The workshop is hosted by the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology and the instructor will be Prof. M.G. Sreekumar – further details are in the workshop brochure (PDF).

Bess Sadler writes that photographs from a Greenstone Workshop in Bulawayo (Zimbabwe) in December 2007 are online.

International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management at Kathmandu, Nepal

HealthNet Nepal and Tribhuvan University, Central Library, Kathmandu, Nepal is organizing ICIKM-2008 from March 24-29, 2008 at Kathmandu, Nepal. The theme is “Information and Knowledge Management in a Connected World: A Challenge for the Developing Countries.” The conference will include a 3-day Greenstone workshop.

One of the major strength of the ICIKM-2008 is three days pre-conference workshop on Greenstone Digital Library, OJS (Open Journal System) and Open Conference System (OCS), and Integrated Library System–KOHA. The concerned developer of the software package i.e. Prof. Ian Witten, Mr. Alec Smecher and Mr. Chris Cormack runs these courses.

You are invited to attend and register to the Conference. We believe you and your colleagues will benefit tremendously from this conference. We encourage you and your colleagues to attend and share experiences with others in the conference.

Registration Information:
For details about the conference registration fee for all presenters and participants and other registration information, please refer to the conference website: www.icikm-2008.com.np

With regards,

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Mohan Raj Pradhan
Member-Secretary
ICIKM-2008
e-mail: [email protected]

We are glad to announce that a three day Advanced Workshop on Greenstone Digital Library Software (GSDL) is organised at National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore from December 26th to 28th, covering Multilingual capability and Interoperability concepts in GSDL, for those who are familiar with basic concepts of GSDL. The workshop is supported by Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) under Technology Information and Facilitation Programme.

Workshop title: DSIR-NCSI Advanced Workshop on Greenstone Digital Library Software (GSDL)

Venue: NCSI, IISc, Bangalore

Date : December 26th to 28th

Prerequisite: Knowledge of basic features and Installation of GSDL.

Topics covered: Multilingual capability and Interoperability in GSDL

Workshop Fee: No registration fee is charged. Working lunch and tea will be provided during the workshop dates. However, participants have to take care of their travel, board and lodging. On request accommodation for participants during the dates 25th to 28th December 2007 will be provided at the ‘Hoysala House’ hostel of IISc. Maximum of 20 participants will be taken for the workshop based on the experience, in using GSDL. Workshop coordinator: Ms. Anuradha.K.T., NCSI, IISc, Bangalore 560 012

Registration: Send an email to [email protected] or [email protected] giving the following details:
1. Name:
2. Official Address and email
3. Experience in using GSDL.
———————————————————————
Ms.K.T.Anuradha E-mail: [email protected]
Senior Technical Officer URL:vidya-mapak.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in
National Centre for Science Information
Indian Institute of Science
Karnataka, Bangalore 560 012
India
FAX:(+91-80) 23601426/23600683
Tel:(+91-80) 23600271/22932511