About Greenstone

DOWNLOAD

Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. It is open-source, multilingual software, issued under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Read the Greenstone Factsheet for more information.
The aim of the Greenstone software is to empower users, particularly in universities, libraries, and other public service institutions, to build their own digital libraries. Digital libraries are radically reforming how information is disseminated and acquired in UNESCO's partner communities and institutions in the fields of education, science and culture around the world, and particularly in developing countries. We hope that this software will encourage the effective deployment of digital libraries to share information and place it in the public domain. Further information can be found in the book How to build a digital library, authored by two of the group's members.

The complete Greenstone interface, and all documentation, is available in English, French, Spanish, Russian and Kazakh. Greenstone also has interfaces in many other languages. We are looking for volunteers to add new language interfaces and help maintain existing ones.
International Links:
Greenstone support for Southern Africa
Greenstone support for South Asia
Grupo de Usuarios de Habla Hispana de Greenstone
Lista De Usuários de Língua Portuguesa do Greenstone
Blog de la communauté francophone
Liste de diffusion de la communauté francophone
برنامج Greenstone للمكتبة الرقمية

If you download and install Greenstone and the documented example collections, it will look like this. If you install Greenstone from the UNESCO CD-ROM, it will look similar, but only a few of the collections will be included, and just the four languages English, French, Spanish and Russian will be enabled. To activate the other languages, please see the Enabling other languages section of the Updating a Greenstone Installation tutorial.
One of the trickier parts of using Greenstone is coming up with a configuration file for your collection. To help learn how to do it, several fully-documented example collections have been placed at nzdl.org which explain, on the collection home page, just how they have been put together. Also, the collect.cfg files for many of the collections at www.nzdl.org have been made available here.