When I was in library school I installed Greenstone to play with it and write about it for an assignment. It was okay, but I was expecting more. Earlier this month I learned that there is a new research version of Greenstone - Greenstone v.3 that will be a complete rewrite of the old version. It will be

a complete redesign and reimplementation of the original Greenstone digital library software (Greenstone2). When complete, it will retain all the advantages of Greenstone2 - for example, it will be multilingual, multiplatform, and highly configurable. It incorporates all the features of the existing system, and is backwards compatible: that is, it can build and run existing collections without modification. Written in Java, it is structured as a network of independent modules that communicate using XML: thus it runs in a distributed fashion and can be spread across different servers as necessary. This modular design increases the flexibility and extensibility of Greenstone.

This from the official site. I’ll be interested to see where this new version goes.

This from SourceForge:

Indiana University today announces the release of open source software to create a digital music library system. The software, called Variations, provides online access to streaming audio and scanned score images in support of teaching, learning, and research.

Variations enables institutions such as college and university libraries and music schools to digitize audio and score materials from their own collections, provide those materials to their students and faculty in an interactive online environment, and respect intellectual property rights.

A key feature of the system for faculty and students is the ability to create bookmarks and playlists for use in studying or in preparing classroom presentations, allowing easy access later on to specific audio time points or segments. A key feature for libraries is a flexible access control and authentication system, which allows libraries to set up access rules based on their own local institutional policies.

Sounds pretty darn awesome - and it’s going right into my open source software presentation!! Learn more about Variations on the official site on SourceForge.

When I was taking my digital library course in library school, I decided to play with Greenstone. Greenstone is an open source digital library software package and now there is a new release available.

We are pleased to announce that the Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X and Source distributions of Greenstone v2.81 are now available for download from:

http://www.greenstone.org/download

The main focus has been on multilingual support. Improvements include handling filenames that include non-ASCII characters, accent folding switched on by default for Lucene, and character based segmentation for CJK languages.

This release also features our new installer, which is 100% open source. Previously we had relied on a commercial program for this, which incurred a significant cost in keeping up to date; consequently we decided to develop our own installer, based on the excellent open source installer toolkits already available.

There are many other significant additions in this release, such as the Fedora Librarian Interface (analogous to GLI, but working with a Fedora repository). See the release notes for the complete details. Specific issues fixed in the 2.81 release can be viewed in Greenstone Trac here and here.

Technorati Tags: greenstone, digital library, open source

This came over the Web4Lib list over the holiday weekend:

Kete 1.1 is now available with a giant helping of new features and improvements. This is also the first release where you can grab Kete from our code repository’s new home at Github.com. See http://kete.net.nz/site/topics/show/25-downloads for details or browse the code online at http://github.com/kete/kete/.

For those who haven’t seen Kete in action, Kete is open source software that enables communities, whether the community is a town or a company, to collaboratively build their own digital libraries, archives and repositories. Kete combines features from Knowledge and Content Management Systems as well as collaboration tools such as wikis, blogs, tags, and online forums to make it easy to add and relate content on a Kete site. You could create a service like Google’s Knol for your community using Kete.

I’ve seen Kete in action and it’s pretty darn neat, so check out this new release!!

Technorati Tags: kete

Yesterday a librarian pointed me to an interesting sounding new open source tool.

Alfresco is the Open Source Alternative for Enterprise Content Management (ECM), providing Document Management, Collaboration, Records Management, Knowledge Management, Web Content Management and Imaging.

Is anyone using this product? Or have you tested it? I’d love to hear from you - I’m wondering how I had never heard of this before!

This article sounds interesting:

The open source digital library software Greenstone is demonstrated running on an iPod. The standalone configuration supports browsing, searching and displaying documents in a range of media formats. Plugged in to a host computer (Mac, Linux, or Windows), the exact same facilities are made available to the world through a built-in web server.

I don’t have access to this publication - if you’ve read this, let me know what you think.