Customizing digital library interfaces with Greenstone

Digital libraries are organized, focused collections of information. They are focused on a particular topic or theme—and good digital libraries will articulate the principles governing what is included. They are organized to make information accessible in particular, well-defined, ways—and good ones will include a description of how the information is organized (Lesk, 1997). The Greenstone digital library software is intended to help users construct simple collections of information very quickly. Indeed, only a few minutes of the user's time are needed to set up a collection based on a standard design and initiate the building process. Collections may be large—some comprise Gbytes of text; millions of documents. Furthermore, even larger volumes of information may be associated with a collection—typically audio, image, and video, with textual metadata. Once initiated, the mechanical process of building the collection may take from a few moments for a tiny collection to several hours for a multi-Gbyte one—perhaps even a day if it involves many different full-text indexes

Constructing digital library interfaces

The software technologies used to create web interfaces for digital libraries are discussed using examples from Greenstone 3

Creating and customizing digital library collections with the Greenstone Librarian Interface

The Greenstone digital library software is a comprehensive system for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet. This paper describes how digital library collections can be created and customized with the new Greenstone Librarian Interface. Its basic features allow users to add documents and metadata to collections, create new collections whose structure mirrors existing ones, and build collections and put them in place so for users to view. More advanced users can design and customize new collection structures. At the most advanced level, the Librarian Interface gives expert users interactive access to the full power of Greenstone, which could formerly be tapped only by running Perl scripts manually

Creating digital library collections with Greenstone

The Greenstone digital library software is a comprehensive system for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a way of organizing information based on metadata and publishing ti on the Internet. This paper introduces Greenstone and explains how librarians use it to create and customize digital library collections. Through an end-user interface, they add documents and metadata to collections, create new collections whose structure mirrors existing ones, and build collections and put them in place for users to view. More advanced users can design and customize new collection structures

Assembling and enriching digital library collections

People who create digital libraries need to gather together the raw material, add metadata as necessary, and design and build new collections. This paper sets out the requirements for these tasks and describes a new tool that supports them interactively, making it easy for users to create their own collections from electronic files of all types. The process involves selecting documents for inclusion, coming up with a suitable metadata set, assigning metadata to each document or group of documents, designing the form of the collection in terms of document formats, searchable indexes, and browsing facilities, building the necessary indexes and data structures, and putting the collection in place for others to use. Moreover, different situations require different workflows, and the system must be flexible enough to cope with these demands. Although the tool is specific to the Greenstone digital library software, the underlying ideas should prove useful in more general contexts

Digitizing criminals: Web delivery of a century on the cheap.

This article presents the process, challenges and lessons learned from carrying out a small digital project to create a web resource of unique historic materials related to crime in New York City. All aspects of digital project management are discussed including selection, infrastructure, budgeting, workflow and delivery. Experiences from project administration, including management of a combination in-house and outsourced digitization and metadata are discussed. Formation and management of the resulting web resource is explained, which is the product of a creative amalgamation of commercial and open source software. Challenges encountered are presented with suggestions for practical solutions and considerations for future projects

Development of Multilingual Resource Management Mechanisms for Libraries

Multilingual is one of the important concept in any library. This study is create on the basis of global recommendations and local requirement for each and every libraries. Select the multilingual components for setting up the multilingual cluster in different libraries to each user. Development of multilingual environment for accessing and retrieving the library resources among the users as well as library professionals. Now, the methodology of integration of Google Indic Transliteration for libraries have follow the five steps such as (i) selection of transliteration tools for libraries (ii) comparison of tools for libraries (iii) integration Methods in Koha for libraries (iv) Development of Google indic transliteration in Koha for users (v) testing for libraries (vi) results for libraries. Development of multilingual framework for libraries is also an important task in integrated library system and in this section have follow the some important steps such as (i) Bengali Language Installation in Koha for libraries (ii) Settings Multilingual System Preferences in Koha for libraries (iii) Translate the Modules for libraries (iv) Bengali Interface in Koha for libraries. Apart from these it has also shows the Bengali data entry process in Koha for libraries such as Data Entry through Ibus Avro Phonetics for libraries and Data Entry through Virtual Keyboard for libraries. Development of Multilingual Digital Resource Management for libraries by using the DSpace and Greenstone. Management of multilingual for libraries in different areas such as federated searching (VuFind Multilingual Discovery tool ; Multilingual Retrieval in OAI-PMH tool ; Multilingual Data Import through Z39.50 Server ). Multilingual bibliographic data edit through MarcEditor for the better management of integrated library management system. It has also create and editing the content by using the content management system tool for efficient and effective retrieval of multilingual digital content resources among the users

Usability of Digital Repository Software: A Study of DSpace Installation and Configuration

Abstract. Usability of the installation and configuration of digital repository software is a key factor for the implementation of digital repositories. Many universities, laboratories and companies want to place their collections online but the installation and configuration processes of digital repositories are sometimes time-consuming and unnecessarily complicated. This paper describes efforts to highlight usability issues while setting up and configuring DSpace. The focus of three studies that were performed was not end-user usability but usability of the administrative functionality. User evaluations performed on a recent version of DSpace were followed by participatory design of a tool to increase usability by abstracting away the lower-level details. Users agreed that such a tool would be suitably usable. Thus it was found that significant usability problems exist, but these problems may in fact be easily addressed

Customizing Digital Libraries for Small Screen Devices

In this paper we present a system that allows users to access digital libraries using small screen devices. Instead of providing users with a single hard-coded solution, we allow them to customize how the content is structured, formatted and viewed on the small display. The centre of our system is a tool that can be used to customize Greenstone Digital Library collections for small displays. To lower the entry level, this tool has been designed to provide an abstraction from Greenstone’s low level architecture and other computing technologies, such as HTML and Java Script. We also place a strong emphasis on evaluation and incorporate users throughout the software development cycle. Lastly in the discussion, we speculate that by designing usable and customizable systems, there is the potential of breaking down the open source revenue model, which relies on providing services for systems that are hard to use and configure

Digital Library Architecture

Digital library is a very complex system. A digital library can have multi-tier architecture. Different digital libraries follow different architectures and models. This paper discusses the basic concepts and principles involved in its design and architecture. It further presents an evaluative account of various digital library architectures