Greenstone Digital Library Software.

Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a way of organizing information and publishing it on the web or on removable media such as DVD and USB flash drives. Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. It is open-source, multilingual software, issued under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

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. 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. We hope that this software will encourage the effective deployment of digital libraries to share information and place it in the public domain. 

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.

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.

It 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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:

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.

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.