Greenstone Support

Want to learn a bit more about Greenstone? Having trouble installing or building collections? There are many sources of help for you to turn to.

Greenstone Documentation Wiki

The Greenstone wiki is a one-stop shop for all documentation about Greenstone, including the following:

  • Release Notes Release notes are published for each new release, and include a heap of useful information such as installation instructions, important changes and bug fixes, known issues, etc.
  • Beginner Guide Guide to the basics of using the Greenstone software.
  • Greenstone Tutorials There are many Greenstone tutorials to teach you about how to build different kinds of collections.
  • FAQ The FAQ contains a list of common questions to do with Greenstone, including how to get the software, installation and running of Greenstone, and collection building. This was part of the old wiki and may be out-of-date.
  • Greenstone Legacy Documentation There are several manuals and guides that come with Greenstone. This page provides links to them all, many of them in multiple languages. They are old, and haven't been updated recently, but may still be useful.
  • Documented Example Collections Greenstone collections whose "about" page describes how they are constructed. This page gives a brief description and provides links to them.

Mailing Lists

There are several Greenstone related mailing lists, intended primarily for discussions about the Greenstone digital library software. Active users of Greenstone should consider joining one or more of these lists and contributing to the discussions.

Note: Please consult the other information sources, particularly the wiki and mailing list archives, before posting a question to a list.

Note: You may need to subscribe to these lists before you post to them.

The following lists are run by other organisations, and are not monitored by the Greenstone team.

The following two lists are run by the Greenstone development team, and are English language lists.

Regional Support Groups

Several regional groups exist that provide support for using Greenstone:

  • African Digital Library Support Network (ADLSN) African Digital Libraries Support Network (ADLSN) is a community of African practitioners and other interested actors with a common goal of supporting the preservation and dissemination of local digital content. They work through National Centres and Support Communities in the following countries: Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.
  • Greenstone Support for South Asia This support effort is undertaken by the Center for the Development of Digital Libraries (CDDL) at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Kozhikode in collaboration with the Digital Library Network South Asia and the Greenstone development team in order to ensure effective promotion and support for Greenstone in South Asia.
  • Centro Nacional de Promocion de Greenstone Argentina's National Centre for the Promotion of Greenstone.
  • Arabic Greenstone blog Arabic language blog discussing Greenstone and digital library issues.

Other Resources

How To Build a Digital Library
What is a digital library? What does it look like? Where does the information come from? How do you put it together? Where to start? This is a book that answers these questions in a plain and straightforward manner, with a strong practical "how to" flavour. The book also describes the Greenstone software.

Commercial Support

Prodigio Consultores offer professional services for Greenstone in Latin America. They are major contributors to Greenstone support in Spanish.

Training

A variety of organizations have run Greenstone training courses in the past, not all of which we have been involved in:

UNESCO has sponsored training courses in Bangalore (2002 and 2003), Almaty (2003), Suva (2003, with USP), Senegal (2004)
Contact Jean-Claude Dauphin [email protected]

UNESCO IITE (Institute of Information Technology in Education) are planning courses in Cairo, Bangkok, Moscow
Contact Azat Khannanov [email protected]

University of Pune, India by Shubhada Nagarkar [email protected]

IIM Kozhikode by M.G. Sreekumar [email protected]

Infomed Cuba by Gustavo Kouri [email protected]

SLAIS, University of British Columbia by Edie Rasmussen [email protected]

FAO and SPC Fiji by Christina Tuitubou [email protected]

Digital Library conferences sometimes have Greenstone tutorials
JCDL, ECDL, ICADL, ICDL

Librarian conferences sometimes have Greenstone workshops and presentations
LITA, ALA Annual Conference, ASIST

We do not know what upcoming courses these organizations are scheduling: please contact them directly.

Alternatively, if your department/organization is willing to organise and fund a Greenstone workshop in your area, we might be able to run it (depending on what other commitments we have). We would require our air travel and basic accomodation to be paid for, and if you're feeling generous, a donation towards our research costs would be appreciated.

Self-study courses

FAO/UNESCO have developed a self-paced module entitled "Digitization and Digital Libraries" available at: http://www.imarkgroup.org/ or contact: [email protected]

IITE have a self-study course "Digital libraries in education"
Contact Azat Khannanov [email protected]

Donations and Contract Research

Greenstone is distributed free under the GNU General Public License, and will continue to be. We provide support by responding to queries on the email lists, and will continue to do this to the best of our ability - but we cannot guarantee this service, particularly with increasing traffic. For those with funds, there are further opportunities.

Want a new feature? The Greenstone research group undertakes contract research to enhance Greenstone by adding new facilities and features. Contact [email protected].