The developers’ section of this website has been launched. This gives greenstone contributors access to a more extensive and more integrated set of online development tools.

These tools include greenstone trac, our new bug tracking system and source code browser, greenstone svn, our source code repository, the greenstone wiki, the home-base for greenstone documentation, and the greenstone mailing lists.

Programmers, language maintainers, document writers, feature requesters, and anyone else who wants to help with greenstone development should register as a developer. Once you are registered, you use a single username and password to access all of the greenstone tools.

Please post a comment if you have questions, comments or suggestions. Happy development!

For some time now the Waikato team has been experimenting in the lab with multimedia capabilities for digital libraries. Thanks to funding from the New Zealand Foundation for Research Science and Technology (FRST) this will now go “main stream” in the Greenstone project. The research programme, which spans the next four years, includes content analysis for images, audio and video, with specialisations for digitized newspapers and music. From this analysis, enriched media content can be stored and utilised in the digital library.

We also, at this stage, predict a stronger role played by AJAX in the development of client-side interfaces to access this media rich content in Greenstone. Veronica’s realistic electronic books is one such existing example. Tangible software outcomes from the research — for instance, video streaming playback that exploits a suite of video processing capabilities such as keyframe identification — will go into the Greenstone code base, managed through an extension mechanism.

We are pleased to announce that Greenstone v2.74 is now available for download.

This is a stable release. It has been tested extensively.
It contains mainly bug fixes and no new features.

Important changes in this release include (in no particular order):

• MetadataXMLPlug can no longer be removed
• Fixed authentication bugs on windows
• Fixed bugs in the remote GLI
• Interface improvements in GLI
• New ‘NoText’ metadata can be used to suppress the dummy text
• Make remote GLI work ok IIS 6
• Download plug for downloading from a Mediawiki website from GLI
• Open on the File menu is disabled while a collection is loading to prevent exceptions
• Can now double click an index to bring up the ‘Edit Index’ window
• Added Catalan GLI interface. Many thanks to Eduardo el Valle
• Added Vietnamese GLI interface. Many thanks to Cao Minh Kiem

…and many other improvements and bug fixes