We are pleased to announce that an overview of results from the 2009 Greenstone User and Developer survey is available online at: http://greenstonesurvey.wordpress.com/greenstone-user-and-developer-survey-results/.

Through the survey, we were able to gather information from a geographically dispersed group of organizations and individuals who use Greenstone Digital Library Software. A primary component of the survey focused on how support resources are used and how current resources meet user needs.

The overview includes results from all major sections of the survey, which were the following:

• Background information (modes of use and basic use demographics);
• User Satisfaction;
• Support Mechanisms and Resources;
• Organizational Contexts;
• Technical Environments (Version Use and OS);
• Collections and Audiences; and
• Developers.

We’d like to thank respondents for participating in the survey and sharing information about their Greenstone experience!

Please take the Greenstone User Survey!  10-15 minutes of your time can help us learn more about Greenstone software users and developers. With your help, we will gain a better understanding of Greenstone software and support resource use and satisfaction; in what ways Greenstone users interact with and use the software; and the organizational and technical environments in which Greenstone software is used.

If you work with Greenstone to:
•    Develop digital library collections;
•    Teach about digital libraries;
•    Learn about digital libraries;
•    Develop language interfaces for Greenstone;
•    Develop other functionalities or code for Greenstone;
•    Disseminate or otherwise support use of Greenstone,
You are eligible to participate in this study.

How to participate:
Read information about the survey and your rights as a participant at:
http://greenstonesurvey.wordpress.com/infosheet/.
Then click the link at the bottom of the survey information page to continue to the survey.

In addition to the online survey, a pdf version is also available.
Contact Laura Sheble at sheble@email.unc.edu for a copy of the pdf survey.

Want to do more?
Help us distribute the survey:  Inform other Greenstone software users
and developers about this survey by posting a link to this blog entry
or by sending an email with the information above. Thank you for your help!

Would you like to have a Greenstone3 server in your pocket? Now you can with our port of the run-time system to Android. Fire-up Greenstone3 on your mobile phone and then access it just like any other Greenstone server, searching and browsing multimedia collections. You can connect to it over a wi-fi network, an ad-hoc wireless network (device-to-device) or via a USB cable.

You may have read about our earlier success in porting Greenstone2 to Apple devices. We have Greenstone2 running on early (3rd to 5th generation) iPods (see details of our demo) and the iPod Touch (see our paper here). Now Greenstone3, our next-generation digital library software, runs on a mobile handset.

Specifically, it runs on an HTC G1 Android-powered mobile phone. Android is a project of the Open Handset Alliance, and is an open platform for mobile devices.

How does it work?

Collections are built on a desktop computer in the same way as with standard Greenstone3. It is the runtime code that we have ported.

Greenstone3 conventionally runs as web-application of a Tomcat web server. However, it’s not tied to Tomcat, and can be used with an alternative web server such as Jetty . Of course, these and other desktop web servers aren’t going to run on a mobile device. Fortunately the people at Webtide have created i-jetty , a port of Jetty to Android, which solved our mobile web server requirements.

Greenstone3 is written in Java, as are Android applications. Normally though, Greenstone3 uses mg++ for indexing and GDBM as its database. Unfortunately both are written in C/C++ which isn’t much help when a totally Java runtime is needed. However, Greenstone3 supports the use of Lucene (indexing) and JDBM (database), both of which are Java. Using these we can build collections such that only Java is required for a fully functional Greenstone3 server.

However Android Java isn’t exactly the same as desktop Java, so some modification of the Greenstone3 runtime source code was required. This mainly relates to as yet unimplemented aspects of Android Java and its limited supported for XML processing. Some workarounds were required because of the limited memory (192Mb RAM) and processor power (528MHz) available on an actual handset.

The runtime is compiled into a JAR file. This and other necessary Java libraries, along with the standard Greenstone3 ‘web’ directory (which includes the collections) is organised into an i-jetty web application directory structure. i-jetty provides a utility to combine this into a WAR file, with Java classes converted into the byte code required by the virtual machine running on the Android device. This is then transferred to the SD card on the phone.

i-jetty is then launched on the phone with Greenstone3 available as a web application and accessible from a web browser by specifying the phone’s IP address and the webapp context as the URL.

At the moment the code is in pre-alpha release state. It works but needs some further debugging and optimization. When it’s ready we’ll make it available separately from the standard Greenstone3 distribution but eventually we’ll integrate it to the Greenstone3 package.

Any enquiries, technical or otherwise, should be sent to stevej@cs.waikato.ac.nz.

Acknowledgement: purchase of the G1 handset was supported by the ICT Science Kudos Award 2008.

The ideas encapsulated in the Greenstone Librarian Interface (GLI) are now available for people working with the Fedora Digital Repository system. Currently the software is checked into the SVN repository — we will produce binaries for this as part of the next general Greenstone release. For now, if you’re interested to try it out, follow the instructions for checking out Greenstone (works with either Greenstone 2 or 3). You will also want to install a version of Fedora.

When you check out the Greenstone Librarian Interface part of the SVN install, you also get all the necessary files for the Fedora Librarian Interface . Once you have the code compiled, where you would usually run ‘gli.sh’ (for Mac or Linux) run ‘fli.sh’. For Windows, it is fli.bat

The OAI Visualisation and metadata analysis tool has been upgraded with:

• lists of potential duplicate values for each element (using approximate string matching, i.e. edit distances)
• lists of records that are missing particular elements
• better linking to source item records
• greatly improved stability

This new alpha 2 version is now running at the same URL:

http://www.nzdl.org/greenstone3/mat

Starting now, nightly “snapshot” releases of Greenstone3 will be constructed and made available on our snapshots page.

Every night, the most recent revision of the Greenstone3 source code will be automatically checked out, compiled, and packaged up as an easy-to-use installer and put up on our website. These snapshots will be created for Linux and Windows, and soon, Mac. They will be made available in two formats: as an executable Jar, or as a native binary for your operating system. And to make things even easier, there is also a native binary which comes bundled with Java.

As of today, you no longer have to wait for a release to come out before you can take advantage of a new feature of Greenstone3. All you have to do is install the latest snapshot release, and you will have all the features added up to the previous day.

Nightly snapshot releases were made possible by our move to the open source installer Ant Installer. We have been able to construct a release “kit” for each operating system, which automatically creates releases of Greenstone3 using a number of Ant scripts, the Ant Installer software, and a simple executable wrapper program. Since creating a release is now as easy as running a single command, we decided to let the computer create them nightly.

Not surprisingly, the snapshot releases are likely to have a few flaws. These flaws will have two sources: bugs in the release kits, and bugs in the Greenstone code. As far as the release kits are concerned, in time we aim to eliminate all the bugs, so that they produce robust and usable installers. But as for the Greenstone code, we recognise that the most recent revision of the Greenstone code will always have some “bleeding edges”, so we do not expect to ever eliminate all the bugs there. (If you want thoroughly tested releases, go for one of our regular releases, not a snapshot.)

You can help us to perfect the Greenstone3 release kits by downloading and installing a snapshot release, and telling us if you hit any problems. Go on, be brave!

(For those interested, instructions for getting and using the release kits themselves are available at http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/ReleaseKits.)

Also, keep a look out for Greenstone2 snapshot releases and release kits, which are coming soon.

A prototype OAI metadata analysis tool - producing statistics and visualisations of repository metadata - is now online.

Usage notes:

• when clicking on the links of the left of the visualisation
  you may need to configure your browser to allow popups from nzdl.org
• producing the analysis report does take some time (e.g. the whole of IDEALS at Illinois takes about 20-25 minutes) - so, initially, we suggest using the max records option to limit the number of items processed

There also is a short feedback survey where you can add comments and suggestions for new features.

Greenstone3 v3.03 has been released for Windows, GNU/Linux and in Source form (it runs on the Mac no problem; just recompile from source). This release finally contains all the features in Greenstone2, including OAI-PMH and Remote Building support (which are new to this version). It is now very easy to install — just as easy as Greenstone2! This release has been extensively tested.

The principal difference between Greenstone2 and Greenstone3 is the format language. Greenstone3 supports more sophisticated XSLT format statements. Right now they are more complex to use, but developments in the pipeline will make it far easier than Greenstone2 in future. (The only other differences are that Greenstone3 still lacks collaging, and collection/document-level authentication.)

There is one known issue. We forgot to ensure that collections built with Greenstone2 are automatically converted when loaded into GLI under Greenstone3. We will add this facility, but for now a manual conversion program is available here; instructions for its use appear in Greenstone3 for Greenstone2 Users.

Greenstone2 will continue to be supported for a long time yet (years), but ultimately we see Greenstone3 replacing it. See the Greenstone3 home page and the Wiki for more details.

As part of the work on Greenstone 3 we are running a survey on users’ experiences with customizing pages in Greenstone 2 - format statements, macros etc.

We welcome your comments on how we can make collection customization easier in Greenstone 3; the brief anonymous survey is here:

http://chnm.gmu.edu/tools/surveys/2333/

See the Greenstone3 home page. Greenstone2 will continue to be supported for a long time yet (years), but ultimately we see Greenstone3 replacing it. This is a beta release: it contains (virtually) all the features needed for Greenstone2 compatibility, and has been extensively tested. We have added a new section to the Wiki on Greenstone3, and in particular a new page entitled Greenstone3 for Greenstone2 users about how to set it up and migrate your collections (with a list of possible problem areas). Greenstone2 is certainly not yet in the past, but Greenstone3 is definitely the future!