in General, Libraries/Info Sci, Tech

Project Greenstone

I’ve spent the afternoon playing/wrestling with Greenstone, an open source digital library creator. I’ll be using it for my term project in, appropriately enough, Digital Libraries this semester.

While it does some very cool stuff (I might try to get an example set up on the site), it desperately needs a user interface overhaul. The GUI would look at home in Windows 3.1. Greenstone 3.0 is in alpha release, so maybe that’s an improvement. I’ll probably check it out at some point.

And I’m still not sure how I got it to work with images! I tried everything I could think of, but it simply ignored all jpeg and gifs. I downloaded an example library of images from Greenstone’s web site, loaded that, and it worked fine. Then I re-loaded my own library and it has worked since as well. Loading the existing one must have changed a setting somewhere, but I’ve got no idea where. Oh well, good that its working I suppose.