We are pleased to announce the publication of the Second Edition of How to Build a Digital Library.

The Second Edition is a major rewrite, including new material on multimedia, metadata, internationalisation and the roles that people take in digital libraries. The book is divided into two sections: Part I on Principles and Practices and Part II on the Greenstone Digital Library Software. This division allows the book to be used for general digital library courses (using any software) and frees Part II to provide the most detailed description available of the Greenstone software suite.

The book website has lots of supporting material including: samples of the Preface and Chapter 1, an online Appendix on markup and XML, and all of the Figures and Tables.

Witten, I.H., Bainbridge, D. & Nichols, D.M. (2010) How to Build a Digital Library, Second Edition. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.

More details at Amazon.com and WorldCat.

The Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X and Source distributions of Greenstone v2.80
are now available for download from our sourceforge page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/greenstone or via our download page.

There is a patch to the 2.80 release, which is a newer version of the main.cfg file with additional configuration for several new languages: malayalam, marathi, tamil, telugu, bulgarian, and sinhalese. To install the patch, download the new main.cfg by right clicking this link and select “save link as” (or “save target as”). Then replace the old main.cfg, which is in the ‘etc’ folder of your Greenstone installation.

New documentation is available at the documentation section of the Greenstone support for South Asia website. Three new documents have been added entitled Greenstone: A Beginner’s Guide, WINISIS to Greenstone: A Guide and Creating Digital Archives with Winisis.

Interested in the history of the Greenstone project? Here is a brief account.

There is now a Greenstone documentation Wiki that brings together all Greenstone documentation, including manuals, FAQ, tutorial exercises (with sample files), example collections, teaching material, and much more. Please help us with this documentation project; here’s how.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has produced an excellent self-instructional module on Digitization and Digital Libraries, which includes a unit on Greenstone.

Building collections on a remote Greenstone server. This scheme allows users to augment and edit collections that are held on a remote Greenstone server. Users work with a modified version of the Greenstone Librarian Interface but do not need to have Greenstone running locally. Multiple users can collaborate on the same collection (though not at the same time). Here are details of an experimental version that you can download (En Español).