The Hindu Business Line : Make your own library

A self-paced training module on digitalisation and digital libraries, Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing "fully-searchable, digital library collections."

It provides a new way of organising information and publishing it on the Internet or on a CD-ROM.

Developed by UNESCO, FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) and the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISC), it is "intended to lower the bar for construction of practical digital libraries, yet at the same time leave a great deal of flexibility in the hands of the user."

Dr Rajashekar (raja@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in) was the module coordinator at the IISc and Andrew Nadeau, the team leader at the FAO.

Produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO, this open-source, multi-lingual software is issued under the terms of the GNU (General Public License.)

Keeping it simple

The kit, available from the FAO and UNESCO free of charge, has different modules to teach librarians and lay people to digitise documents and create virtual libraries.

To use this tool, a suitable Java Run-time Environment is necessary, which can be downloaded.

The fact sheet explains that Greenstone has two separate interactive interfaces, the Reader interface and the Librarian interface. End users access the digital library through the Reader interface, which operates within a Web browser.

The Librarian interface is a Java-based graphical user interface (also available as an applet) that makes it easy to gather material for a collection (downloading it from the Web where necessary), enrich it by adding metadata, design the searching and browsing facilities that the collection will offer the user, and build and serve the collection.

The interactive module includes 15 hours of training that users can personalise to meet their particular needs at their own pace.

Operations

Greenstone runs under any 32-bit Windows environment (that is, Windows95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP etc.) and will also run on 16 bit Windows and any form of Unix. It is also for Mac OS X running on PowerPC platforms. Compatible with a wide range of computers, Pentium I and later, as well as older operating systems, it is suited for developing countries. English, French, Spanish, and Russian are Greenstone core languages. For these, there is a full translation, including interface, documentation, sample collections, and installation instructions. These have been produced in conjunction with UNESCO and are distributed with all versions of Greenstone, including the CD-ROM version.

They are updated whenever the CD-ROM is re-issued (so far, approximately once a year). The reader's interface is available in Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Spanish, Vietnamese, besides many others.

"This teach-yourself module will contribute greatly to the ability of people in the developing world to digitise information and share it online," says the Director-General of UNESCO, Koochiro Matsuura.

Download the software at http://www.greenstone.org

The UNESCO CD-ROM containing Greenstone 2.60, plus all documentation (English/French/Spanish/Russian), 11 documented example collections, and associated software such as Java and ImageMagick, is available at no charge from Jean-Claude Dauphin (jc.dauphin@unesco.org) or Susannah Farey (s.farey@unesco.org).

Picture by K.V. Srinivasan

paromita@thehindu.co.in

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