What is Digital Library?

INTRODUCTION
A digital library is fundamentally a resource that reconstructs the
intellectual substance and services of a traditional library in digital
form.
Library profession is moving away from traditional library towards
the creation and maintenance of digital library.
Information contents that were confined to traditional formats like
to books, journals, maps, sound recordings are getting increasingly
available in diverse digital formats. New formats, being the core
elements of digital collection, have emerged such as multimedia,
hypertext, dynamic pages, interactive video, etc. Each format poses
distinct challenges for its preservation and access. Capturing,
storing, indexing, preserving and redistributing content with ease
of use and web based user interface are some of the core
challenges of any digital library that are being faced by the library
professionals.
Digital libraries consist of digital contents (which are sometimes
but not necessarily text-based), interconnections (which may be
simple links or complex metadata or query-based relationships),
and software (which may be simple pages in HTML or complex
database management systems). A single, simple, stand-alone web
page is probably not a digital library in any meaningful sense, any
more than a single page or a single book is a traditional library.
Digital libraries are not replacements for traditional libraries. They
are rather the future of traditional libraries, much as medieval
manuscript libraries simply became a specialized and much
revered part of the larger print-based libraries that we have today.

DIGITAL LIBRARY SOFTWARE PACKAGES:

For the construction and administration of a digital library
one needs digital library software. Many commercial digital library
software packages are available today.
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 Made the libraries to go digital. Digital resources are one of
the new categories of information resources in library and
Information centers. Many libraries are now increasingly
involved in the process of creating and acquiring of digital
resources.
Building digital collections have become a wide spread
activity. Creation of digital resources and its management is
not a easy task. There are many issues and challenges, which
the present day librarians' are facing. To retrieve the accurate,
useful and relevant information is very difficult in digital
environment.
Efforts are being made to provide user-friendly software
to manipulate digital information. The present assignment takes the
review of same prominent digital library software available in market,
which will help to take decision on selecting the appropriate software
for managing an efficient digital library.

SCOPE OF STUDY:
Scope of the study is limited to Greenstone3 digital library software.

DIGITAL LIBRARY SOFTWARE:

Type of Software:
Proprietary (Commercial) Software
Free/Open Source Software (FOSS)
Famous Digital Library Software:
1. Dspace
2. Greenstone3

Greenstone3:
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

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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 Aims and Objectives:-

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 three of
the group' 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. Browse
facility under GNU general public License.

About Greenstone:-

1. This s/w is developed and distributed as an international

cooperative effort established in august 2000 among three
parties:

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 i. NZDL(New Zealand Digital Library Project at the
University of Waikato)
ii. UNESCO(United Nation Educational, Scientific &
cultural Organization)
iii. The Human Info NGO, based in Antwerp, Belgium.
2. Greenstone also has interface in many languages.

Features of Greenstone:-

Greenstone supports most of the commonly used file formats like

TXT, RTF, DOC, PPT, XLS, PDF, AVI, MPEG etc. with the
support of appropriate plug-ins'. Both repositories support HTML
and web pages without any dynamic content.
i. Greenstone provides Java based Interface.
ii. Greenstone provides security through user-ids and passwords.

iii. Accessible via web browserCollections are accessed through a

standard web browser (Netscape or Internet Explorer) and combine
easy-to-use browsing with powerful search facilities. Interfacing &
Content Delivery via Web Metadata Extraction Concurrent &
Dynamic Content Development Uniform Presentation.
iv. Collections can be distributed amongst different computers A
flexible process structure allows different collections to be served
by different computers, yet be presented to the user in the same
way, on the same web page, as part of the same digital library.
v. Full-text and fielded searchIt builds collection with effective full-
text searching and metadata-based browsing facilities. Collection
containing millions of documents, up to several gigabytes can be
built.
vi. Full-text and fielded BrowseFull-text searching is fast because
compression is used to reduce the size of the indexes and text users
can browse the list of authors, titles, date, class no., etc.
vii. Collections can contain text, pictures, audio, and video Plugins
can be written to accommodate new document types, the collection
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 can contain pictures, music, audio, video clips, etc. It also supports
multilingual documents.
viii. Plugins extend the system's capabilitiesThe software is organized
so that "plugins" import documents and transform them into a
standard XML form with metadata included. There are plugins for
plain text documents; HTML, Word, PostScript and PDF files;
email; and common bibliographic formats. New plugins can easily
be written -- several have been specially produced for proprietary
formats. If the collection contains source documents in different
forms, it is just a matter of specifying the necessary plugins.

Modules called "classifiers" build browsing structures from

metadata -- alphabetic lists, dates, hierarchical classifications, etc.
Although primarily designed for web access, collections can be
printed on self-installing Windows CD-ROMs with a built-in web
server and the same web interface. These operate standalone on all
Windows versions -- a requirement that complicates the software
design but is crucial for users in underdeveloped countries seeking
access to humanitarian aid collections.
ix. Operates on both Windows and UnixThe system operates under
Unix, Windows, and Mac OS/X, and works with standard Web
servers. A flexible process structure allows different collections to
be served by different computers and yet presented to the user as
part of the same digital library
x. Collection can be updated and new one brought online any time
without bringing down the system.
xi. Documents can be in any language: Unicode is used throughout
the software, allowing any language to be processed in a consistent
manner. To date, collections have been built containing French,
Spanish, Maori, Chinese, Arabic and English. On-the-fly
conversion is used to convert from Unicode to an alphabet
supported by the user's web browser.
xii. Uses advanced compression Techniques Compression techniques
are used to reduce the size of the indexes and text. Reducing the

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 size of the indexes via compression has the added advantage of
increasing the speed of text retrieval.
xiii. What you get with Greenstone: The Greenstone Digital Library is
open-source software, available from the New Zealand Digital
Library (nzdl.org) under the terms of the Gnu General Public
License. The software includes everything described above: web
serving, CD-ROM creation, collection building, multi-lingual
capability, plugins and classifiers for a variety of different source
document types. It includes an autoinstall feature to allow easy
installation on both Windows and Unix. In the spirit of open-
source software, users are encouraged to contribute modifications
and enhancements.

The Collector:-

The structure of each collection is determined at set up. This includes

specifying the format (or formats) of source documents, deciding how to
display the documents on the screen, determining what the source of
metadata will be, choosing what full-text searching and browsing
facilities should be provided, and outlining how the search and browsing
results should be displayed. Once a collection is in place, new
documents in the same format can be added automatically.

The Greenstone "Collector" is an interactive subsystem for managing

and accessing collections. The Collector can be used to:( Working with
existing collections)

create a new collection with the same structure as an existing one;

create a new collection with a different structure;

add new material to an existing collection;

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 modify the structure of an existing collection;

delete a collection;

Preview Collection;

. Write an existing collection to a self-contained, self-installing Windows

CD-ROM. (printing it on a CD-ROM.)

Dialog structure

Upon completion of login, a new page appears that shows the sequence
of steps involved in collection building:

1. Collection information:-collection information is to enter some

information about the new collection. The title is a short phrase
used to identify the collection.

2. Source data:-The user specifies the source text that comprises the
collection. The collection is either completely new or a "clone" of
an existing one.

3. Configuring the collection:-The construction and presentation of

all collections is controlled by specifications in a configuration file.

4. Building the collection:-The building stage is potentially time-

consuming. Small collections take a minute or so but large ones
can take a day or more.

5. Viewing the collection:-When the collection is built and installed, a

View collection button becomes active. Clicking this button takes
the user directly to the newly built collection.

Greenstone provides:

Flexible searching. Users can search the documents- full text,

choosing between indexes built from different parts. Queries can

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 be ranked or Boolean; terms can be stemmed or unstemmed, case-
folded or not.

Flexible browsing. Users can browse lists of authors, lists of titles,

lists of dates, hierarchical classification structures, and so on.
Different collections offer different browsing facilities,
determined at build time.

Zero maintenance. All structures are built directly from the

documents themselves. New documents in the same format can
be merged into the collection automatically. No links need be
inserted by hand, but existing hypertext links in the original
documents, leading both within and outside the collection, are
preserved.

Sustained operation.New collections can be installed without

bringing the system down. Even active users rarely notice when a
collection is updated.

All the software has their own advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages:

1 It is open source software.

2 Multilingual Software.

3 Include source code for the system, which can be dealt with in a
language C++.

4 Mailing List: The system provides a set of standards and

metadata Dublin core standard. There are of greenstone mailing list
dedicated to discussion about the program. Where Active users of
greenstone program together, interact and contribute through this
group.

Disadvantages:-
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 1 Multiple Programming languages used in it, such as java, Perl
and C++ requires the possession of advanced technical expertise in
programming.

2 Save lose the original file name after the transmission is the
program Greenstone, but it retains other characteristics such as size
and creation date.

Summary:-

We close with a brief summary of Greenstone facilities.

Greenstone is:

Widely accessible. Collections are accessed through a standard

web browser.

Multi-platform. Collections can be served on Windows and Unix,

with an external Web server or (for Windows) a built-in one.

Extensible. Plugging can be written to accommodate new

document types. Classifiers can be written to create new kinds of
browsing indexes based on metadata.

Multi-language. Unicode is used throughout and is converted on-

the-fly to an encoding supported by the users Web browser.
Separate indexes can be built for different languages: a plugin
allows automatic language identification for multilingual
collections.

International.The interface is available in multiple languages:

new ones are easy to add.

Large-scale. Collections containing millions of documents, and

up to several gigabytes, have been built. Full-text searching is fast.
Compression is used to reduce the size of the indexes and text.

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References:

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