Greenstone in Practice: Implementations of an Open Source Digital Library System

Transcription

1 Greenstone in Practice: Implementations of an Open Source Digital Library System Sponsored by SIG DL Allison B. Zhang, Corresponding Author Washington Research Library Consortium, 901 Commerce Drive, Upper Marlboro, MD Ian H. Witten Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Hillcrest Road, Hamilton, New Zealand. Tod A. Olson University of Chicago, 1100 East 57th Street, Room 220, Chicago, Illinois, Laura Sheble Wayne State University, 5048 Gullen Mall, Science & Engineering Library, 7th Floor, Detroit, MI The Greenstone digital library software is a comprehensive, open-source system for constructing, presenting, and maintaining digital collections. 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 widely used internationally, and collections exist in many of the world's languages. Greenstone runs under Unix, Windows and Mac (OS/X) and is issued under the GNU general public license. Selecting and implementing Greenstone helped many digital library practitioners build comprehensive and flexible digital collections at relatively low cost, and allowed them to tailor the software for local environments and organizational needs. The panel, consisting of Greenstone developer and implementers, will introduce Greenstone software and demonstrate installation and collection building, present customized

2 Greenstone user interfaces, discuss technical and organizational aspects of Greenstone implementations at their organizations, report the results of the 2004 Greenstone User Survey, which focused on support mechanisms, as well as the characteristics of organizations implementing Greenstone, their audiences and system needs. The Greenstone digital library software Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It is not a digital library but a tool for building digital libraries. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet in the form of a fully-searchable, metadata-driven digital library. It has been developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO in Belgium. It is open-source, multilingual software, issued under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Its developers received the 2004 IFIP Namur award for contributions to the awareness of social implications of information technology, and the need for an holistic approach in the use of information technology that takes account of social implications. Technical Platforms Greenstone runs on all versions of Windows, and Unix, and Mac OS-X. It is very easy to install. For the default Windows installation absolutely no configuration is necessary, and end users routinely install Greenstone on their personal laptops or workstations. Institutional users run it on their main web server, where it interoperates with standard web server software (e.g. Apache). Interoperability Greenstone is highly interoperable using contemporary standards, It incorporates a server that can serve any collection over the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and Greenstone can harvest documents over OAI-PMH and include them in a collection. Any collection can be exported to METS (in the Greenstone METS Profile, approved by the METS Editorial Board and published at and Greenstone can ingest documents in METS form. Any collection can be exported to DSpace ready for DSpace s batch import program, and any DSpace collection can be imported into Greenstone.

3 Interfaces Greenstone has two separate interactive interfaces, the Reader interface and the Librarian interface. End users access the digital library through the Reader interface, which operates within a web browser. The Librarian interface is a Java-based graphical user interface (also available as an applet) that makes it easy to gather material for a collection (downloading it from the web where necessary), enrich it by adding metadata, design the searching and browsing facilities that the collection will offer the user, and build and serve the collection. Metadata formats Users define metadata interactively within the Librarian interface. These metadata sets are predefined: Dublin Core (qualified and unqualified) RFC 1807 NZGLS (New Zealand Government Locator Service) AGLS (Australian Government Locator Service) New metadata sets can be defined using Greenstone s Metadata Set Editor. Plug-ins are used to ingest externally-prepared metadata in different forms, and plug-ins exist for: XML, MARC, CDS/ISIS, ProCite, BibTex, Refer, OAI, DSpace, METS Document formats Plug-ins are also used to ingest documents. For textual documents, there are plug-ins for: PDF, PostScript, Word, RTF, HTML, Plain text, Latex, ZIP archives, Excel, PPT, (various formats), source code For multimedia documents, there are plug-ins for: Images (any format, including GIF, JIF, JPEG, TIFF), MP3 audio, Ogg Vorbis audio, and a generic plug-in that can be configured for audio formats, MPEG, MIDI, etc.

4 User base Distribution As with all open source projects, the user base for Greenstone is unknown. It is distributed on SourceForge, a leading distribution centre for open source software. Examples Examples of public Greenstone collections (see for URLs) can be found at: Association of Indian Labour Historians, Delhi Auburn University, Alabama California University at Riverside Charles Darwin University,Australia Chicago University Library Detroit Public Library Gresham College, London Hawaiian Electronic Library iarchives, Utah Illinois Wesleyan University Ionian University, Greece Indian Institute of Management Kyrgyz Republic National Library LeHigh University, Pennsylvania Mari El Republic, Russia National Centre for Science Information, Bangalore, India Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services New York Botanical Garden Peking University Digital Library Philippine Research Education and Government Information Network Secretary of Human Rights of Argentina Slavonski Brod Public Library, Slovenia State Library of Tasmania Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences Texas A&M University Center for the Study of Digital Libraries

5 Tulane University University of Illinois University of Namibia University of North Carolina ibiblio project Vietnam National University Vimercate Public Library, Milan, Italy Washington Research Library Consortium Welsh Books Council Yale University UN agencies with an interest in Greenstone include: UNESCO, Paris sponsors distribution of the Greenstone software as part of its Information for All program. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Rome, Information Management Resource Kit uses Greenstone as the (only) example of digital library software in the Digitization and digital libraries self-instructional module. Institute for Information Technology in Education (IITE), Moscow have commissioned an extensive course on Digital libraries in education that uses Greenstone for all the practical work. United Nations University (UNU), Japan: Two CD-ROM collections of UNU material have been produced. Humanitarian collections Greenstone is used by Human Info NGO in Belgium to produced collections of humanitarian information and distribute them on CD-ROM widely throughout the developing world. (For more information, contact Michel Loots Languages One of Greenstone s unique strengths is its multilingual nature. The reader s interface is available in the following languages:

6 Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), Dutch, English, Farsi, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Maori, Mongolian, Portuguese (BR and PT versions), Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese The Librarian interface and the full Greenstone documentation (which is extensive) is in: English, French, Spanish, and Russian. Training is a bottleneck for widespread adoption of any digital library software. Many international training courses have been run. UNESCO has sponsored training courses in Bangalore (2002 and 2003), Almaty (2003), Senegal (2004), Suva (2004). Self-study courses: FAO and UNESCO IITE have produced training material on Greenstone. Digital Library conferences: There have been Greenstone tutorials (on several occasions) at all major digital library conferences: JCDL, ECDL, ICADL, ICDL. Librarian conferences: There have been Greenstone workshops and presentations at LITA, DLF, ALA Annual Conference. Payson Institute, Tulane University has run courses that use Greenstone collections as a resource in locations in Africa (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo) and Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala). Others: There have been several Greenstone courses in India (e.g. Khozikode, Poona), some in Canada (Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton), one in Cuba (Havana). support

7 Organizational implementation: the Washington Research Library Consortium: Customizing the Greenstone User Interface to Meet Organizational Needs WRLC is a consortium of eight university libraries in Washington, DC and Virginia. Our member libraries include American University, Catholic University of America, Gallaudet University, George Washington University, Georgetown University, University of the District Columbia, George Mason University, and Marymount University. WRLC has worked extensively on customizing the appearance of Greenstone and its user interfaces. Background In 2002, WRLC received a National Leadership Grant from IMLS to build a Digital Collections Production Center (DCPC) providing conversion services in a production environment for WRLC member libraries. In order to build and distribute digital collections in a consortium environment, we needed a digital library system that is powerful and flexible enough to be tailored to our organizational needs. We were looking for two important user interfaces, public user interface for presentation and staff user interface for metadata creation and administration. For public user interface, we required a very good browsing feature since users may know nothing about a collection and browsing will provide them with a good starting point to explore the collection. A powerful search engine is another important feature we expected. The user interface should be easy to navigate and easy to customize. Due to the consortium libraries' participation in various overlapping projects and systems, each digital collection will be independent and it should be indexed and displayed separately. It is very important to make the libraries' digital collections available across multiple environments and accessible through multiple channels. The libraries may use individual digital objects outside the WRLC digital library system for online exhibits or other purposes. Each digital object and related metadata needs to be independently accessible and in standard formats in order to be linked from other online systems. The system should have the ability to display multi-page documents and various document formats. (Zhang & Gourley, 2003) We also expected a system that support federated searching so that our users can search all collections in one place. The staff user interface is crucial for staff to create metadata records efficiently. It is a tool to describe individual digital objects and their relationships. It is also used to retrieve and manage the master and derivative image files. It should allow staff to create templates, to view the digital object being described, to search, edit and delete records, to make global changes, and to have local authority control. An important feature is ease of use since staff at the member libraries will use this tool to edit and enhance their records, and that staff may not be specially trained in metadata creation. We also required that the software be extensible for adopting new standards and formats. The system should be suitable to manage the features of multiple independent collections and to meet the requirements

8 of our local workflow and procedures. (Zhang & Gourley, 2003) We evaluated and tested both commercial systems and open source software and found no system that met our needs completely. We decided to adopt two open source software, Greenstone for the public user interface, and DC-dot for metadata creation. We selected Greenstone because firstly, it is an open source software, which allows us to modify and tailor it to our organizational needs. Secondly, it meets the most requirements we looked for the public user interface, except the display of multi-page documents and the federated searching. Customize Greenstone Public User Interface Greenstone's user interface is workable and configurable, but in its default form it is rather basic. We focused significant effort on data presentation to deliver our collections through a standard and attractive user interface. Since 2002, we have created seventeen digital collections in various material types, including photographs, manuscripts, color slides, typescripts, comic books, magazines, and so on. We display these collections differently based on the type of material and the metadata. To make the interface more user-friendly and attractive, we developed several new macros, which are used to control the user interface in Greenstone, and redesigned all graphics to add different "flavors" to the individual collections. (See Figure 1) We also successfully display EAD finding aids using Greenstone. Figure 1: Sample digital collections that have standard and attractive user interface. Many of the digital objects in our collections consist of multiple image files. The early version of Greenstone we are using does not support viewing multi-page documents. To facilitate the viewing of these documents, we developed an Image Viewer to create an HTML page that frames an image and provides links to the other images or pages that are part of that digital object. Image Viewer can

9 display a title for the object being viewed and can start at any image contained in the object. Title, starting image, number of images, type of image, and the object location are specified in the Image Viewer URL. (Zhang & Gourley, 2003) The digital objects in some of our collections have hierarchical relationship. For example, Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact is a collection of catholic comic books. The collection contains 15 volumes. Each volume has 20 issues and each issue contains about stories. To facilitate navigation, we created metadata for each story and designed and created structural metadata to link the stories to each issue through metadata record for each issue. Greenstone s conditional format statement makes it possible to display the story page or issue page according to the structural metadata. Figure 2 shows a metadata record display for a story. A user can view the story by clicking on the thumbnail image. He or she can also view the entire issue of the comic book by clicking on the Issue link. Figure 3 shows the display for the issue. A user can click the Table of Content to view each story in this issue or click the cover image to view all images in this issue. Figure 2: Metadata display for a story in the comic book

10 Figure 3: Metadata display for an issue in the comic book How to Customize Greenstone Public User Interface Metadata design is a very important factor that affects the look and feel of Greenstone user interface. Creative structural metadata facilitates navigation and presentation of hierarchical relationship of the digital objects in Greenstone. See the example above. Besides metadata design, Greenstone user interfaces can be customized by modifying or creating the following files in Greenstone system: Configuration file: collect.cfg. Macros New image files. A detailed documentation entitled Customizing the Greenstone User Interface can be found at (Zhang, 2003). Customize Greenstone Staff User Interface In early 2002, when we looked Greenstone, its Librarian Interface was not mature. We developed our

11 own metadata creation tool and data management system by improving another open source software DC-dot (Powell, 2000) and integrating it with Greenstone. The result of our efforts is a fully functional, flexible and powerful digital collections management system that is tailored to our local environment and organizational needs. The system consists of a metadata creation tool and an administration tool. An article describing this system in details can be found at Problems and Expectations Although Greenstone is powerful and flexible, it has drawbacks and problems. The tools for customizing user interface, including the configuration file and hundreds of macros, are flexible but rather complicated. It requires some technical skills and programming knowledge in order to customize the Greenstone user interface in the way that meets a specific need. As new technology develops, we expect more for Greenstone. Highlighting a search result in a PDF document displayed from Greenstone is expected. Automatic keyword extraction and indexing from full-text documents is also expected. Organizational implementation: University of Chicago: Chopin Early Editions Chopin Early Editions (CEE) is the online version of this collection. In producing CEE, a premium was placed on using tools that staff were already familiar with, and on the emerging digital library standards. Scanned images, structural metadata, and descriptive metadata are maintained in separate facilities and brought together into METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) objects, with descriptive metadata encoded as MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema). These METS objects are the reference form of the digital object at a whole, and are repurposed for different uses. In the original plans, the METS objects would be stored in a commercial XML database already used for EAD delivery, and accessed through a custom-programmed interface. The XML database did not at that time (2002) support all of the XML Schema features used by METS and MODS, and a different solution was needed. Greenstone was selected as a delivery platform that could index custom metadata and allow some degree of user interface customisation. In the end, all interface features envisioned in the original plans could be implemented. Workflow is centered around tools that are familiar to the staff. Descriptive metadata are maintained as detailed bibliographic records in the Library s online catalog. MARC records for scores in CEE are pulled out of the catalog and crosswalked to MODS for inclusion in the METS objects. Scores are scanned as archival TIFFs, and derivative JPEG images are produced for delivery over the Web. These image files are stored on disk. At scanning time, structural metadata are recorded in a relational database using Microsoft Access. These data include document number, library catalog

12 record number, order of page images, pagination, and milestones. This information uniquely identifies any page image through a naming convention based on the document number within the collection and the image number within the document. METS with embedded MODS is used for the reference forms of the scores. Using METS, all of the metadata, file references, and structure of a score can be gathered in to one document, with all of the interrelationships made explicit. METS views the object as a hierarchy of object components, each of which may have file content and/or associated metadata. In the CEE scores, the top-level is the score as a whole, with MODS descriptive metadata associated, its sub-components represent the pages and have associated links to image files. The structural metadata drives the automatic generation of a METS file. The transition from the tabular relational database format to the hierarchical METS file is not entirely natural, but is manageable. The number of the score s catalog record is included with the structural metadata, so its MARC record can be retrieved and crosswalked to MODS, provide descriptive metadata in the METS object. Encoding the descriptive metadata in MODS preserves the granularity and semantics of the MARC record in a form that is easily transformed. Once a score is encapsulated in one XML document, it can be repurposed for a variety of uses. Greenstone s internal XML format has a similar hierarchical view of an object. An object is composed of elements, each of which may have a for metadata, which is presented to the user, and more elements underneath. Because they have a similar hierarchical view of an object, METS maps naturally to Greenstone. MODS has a rich, granular hierarchical structure. This is a uniform title in MODS: By contrast,metadata In Greenstone is stored as field-value pairs: <Metadata name="uniformtitle">nocturnes, piano, op. 15</Metadata> The MODS metadata is flattened to fit Greenstone s metadata model, and decisions are made about which elements to keep separate or bind together to support search indexing and browse organization. This loss of granularity in Greenstone does not affect functionality in the interface, because we control the transformation from MODS, and can select and combine MODS elements as needed for specific purposes. The flattened fields support fielded searching, and can still be combined to create hierarchical browses, like Genre, sub-grouped by Uniform Title. Fielded searching is a very common search model, and flattened fields are sufficient to support this without loss of desired functionality. For example, while MODS includes for related items, we do not

13 want to trouble the user with whether their title search will match titles of related items. This choice is made when the MODS records are flattened. If the MODS records were stored natively, the same choice would likely be made by an XPath or XQuery expression behind the scene, and not exposed to the user. In general, the desire to provide simple user interfaces leads digital libraries away from exposing complex, granular metadata schema directly in the user interface, and towards using these schemas to support desired access points. These access points may change between reuses of the metadata, preserving the granularity in the reference object supports this reuse. The MODS descriptive metadata for CEE still exists in the reference object, and may be used in an OAI application directly or crosswalked to Dublin Core, for example. Greenstone allows addressing of any of a document by its position in the document hierarchy. This address is easily calculable, and can be used to build custom navigation within the document. Simple page turning can be arranged by adding metadata to each section with the address of the previous and next pages, and using Greenstone s dynamic formatting facilities to construct links based on those addresses. A table of contents menu can be added to each page at transformation time by adding an HTML form to the, where the target of each entry is identified by its address. Greenstone has proven to be a natural target for the CEE structural metadata, its descriptive metadata model has allowed all desired CEE search and browse facilities, and even desired document navigation has been implemented using only custom transformation of METS and Greenstone s dynamic formatting features. The most recent versions of Greenstone support METS as an optional internal format, and the draft Greenstone METS profile has been registered with the Library of Congress. It is expected that mapping METS objects for the Chopin scores to this profile will be simpler than the mapping to Greenstone s older format, though this has not yet been investigated. Similarly, it is not yet known whether the Greenstone METS implementation will support the same flexibility in customizing user interface features. Greenstone User Survey The Greenstone User Survey was developed to gather feedback from Greenstone users and developers about the adequacy of current support structures and mechanisms and how support for users might be improved or augmented in the future. Additionally, the New Zealand Digital Library Team wanted to learn more about the organizational and technical environments in which Greenstone is implemented and about the user groups for whom the collections are built. The survey also served as a mechanism to gather general feedback from Greenstone users and developers and gave them an opportunity to indicate how they themselves or organizations in the countries in which they work might be interested in participating in the Greenstone support community. Lastly, survey respondents were given the opportunity to contribute information about their collections built with Greenstone for

14 inclusion in the online directory of collections, available in the examples section of the Greenstone website ( This paper outlines descriptive survey results for each major objective of the survey. The survey targeted users and developers of the Greenstone Digital Library Software, that is, those who: (1) Install and build digital collections with Greenstone, (2) develop functionality or language interfaces for the software, (3) use Greenstone as a tool to teach about digital libraries, (4) work to promote or disseminate Greenstone, or (5) use the software in other ways. The survey was not aimed at end users of digital library collections built with Greenstone. Survey Development and Methods The User Survey was developed over the course of several months in the fall of First, a small team composed a core set of questions focusing on support and the organizational and technical environments of users. A variety of question types were included: Checkboxes, multiple choice, rating scales, and a proportionally large number of open ended questions, which we thought was necessary in order to capture survey participants ideas about support structures and mechanisms. A draft of the survey and survey instructions in document format was distributed to select members of the broader Greenstone development community, including members in Africa, Europe, India, and New Zealand, and research support staff at Wayne State University for critique. The survey and instructions were then modified according to the feedback received and both a web-based version and a revised document format version of the survey and instructions were developed. In creating the web based version of the survey, it was necessary to restructure the survey slightly, and also change the structure of the survey so that participants would be required to answer 6 of the 40 survey questions though it was not our original intent to require participants to answer specific questions in order to participate in the survey. This change was necessitated by a combination of the technical design of the survey software and the nature of the questions we wanted to ask. The final version of the survey consists of 40 questions in three sections. The first section, which consists of 24 questions, includes questions about the organizational environment in which Greenstone is used but focuses primarily on support mechanisms. It was estimated that it would take respondents 9 to 14 minutes to complete Section I. Over half of the questions in this section were open ended questions, and the six required questions also fell in Section I. Section II focuses on the collections, technical environments in which Greenstone is used, and ideas about future technical development for the software, and characteristics of the target populations of end users. This section contained 8 questions and was estimated to take 2-3 minutes to complete. The last section, Section III, was an optional, supplementary section where participants were invited to enter their contact information for follow-up activities and to submit collection information for the online directory of Greenstone collections.

15 The survey was announced on the Greenstone Users and Developers lists on December 3rd by Ian Witten, a recognized developer of Greenstone Digital Library Software. Two follow-up announcements were posted, one on December 20th by Professor Witten, and a last call on January 3rd, at which time an extension of the survey to the end of that week, January 7th, was also announced. In actuality, the survey is still available and responses are still read and information and ideas provided by those responses are received with interest. More recent responses, however, were not considered in this analysis. Results The survey received 54 valid responses from Greenstone Users and developers who work with Greenstone in 28 different countries (see Table 1), representing every major geographic region (see Figure 4). 85% of respondents indicated they work with Greenstone in a single country, and 13% in multiple countries. Additionally, 3 respondents indicated that though they work with Greenstone in one country, their collections are developed for users in another country or countries as well as their own. 87% of the responses were submitted via the web survey, and 13% in document format, which the respondent acquired either through or downloading the document from the survey website. Table 1. Countries represented by survey respondents.

16 Figure 4: Regions represented by survey respondents Respondents, their environments, and collections A greater number of survey respondents considered themselves to be basic or occasional Greenstone users or developers (57%) than intensive (knowledgeable and regular) Greenstone users or developers. Respondents perform a variety of functions in the organizations they represented. When asked to describe the organizational context in which they used Greenstone, half of all respondents indicated that they worked with Greenstone in a university or academic institution, 26% at a public service (not for profit) organization at the national level, 20% at a regional or international organization, 20% in an individual capacity, and 7% in a commercial enterprise. Additionally, 3 people indicated they used Greenstone in other organizational contexts, 2 at public libraries and one as a consultant for clients in international development. When asked to describe the functional modes in which they use Greenstone, half of those who responded to this question and 48% of all survey respondents said they worked with Greenstone in multiple functional modes. Nearly all respondents (93%) develop digital library collections with Greenstone. 33% said they use Greenstone to teach about digital libraries, 26% promote or disseminate Greenstone, 11% develop new Greenstone functions, and 7% develop language interfaces for Greenstone. Though they were also able to select other modes of use and indicate

17 what these modes were, none did. Of those who indicated the number of collections they had developed with Greenstone, over half had developed between 1 and 5 collections (53%), about 30% 6 or more collections, 11% were developing their first collection, and 6% had not developed any collections. 7 survey respondents chose not to answer this question. Given a list of terms and asked to choose which best described their Greenstone collections, 40% said their collections were open to the public, 22% said they were for staff use only, and nearly 30% said their collections were available via CD or DVD. Approximately half said their collections were available via the internet. Almost 40% of respondents indicated that their organizations had installed Greenstone on multiple Operating systems. MS Windows XP was the most popular Operating System on which to install Greenstone at 48.1% of respondents. XP was closely followed by Linux, at 40.7% and Windows NT at 33%. When looked at in terms of Microsoft versus non-microsoft systems, 92% of all organizations install Greenstone on some version of the Microsoft operating system and 60% installed Greenstone on a non-microsoft operating system. In order to get a basic understanding of the diversity of target populations for which Greenstone collections are built, survey participants were asked to select terms from a list of 15 descriptive terms to describe their target audiences. Terms related to Academics and Higher Education were most frequently selected, with each selected by approximately 50% of respondents. Respondents also indicated that their collections were primarily for adults (42.8%). Fewer than 15% of collections developed were for use by Children or Teens, and less than 10% by the Elderly. Approximately 30% indicated that the communities who use their collections are multiethnic, about 30% multilingual and 20% multiracial. About a quarter of all target populations were described as Middle class, just under 20% low income, and 5% Upper class. Collections were more likely for Urban and rural communities (22.2% & 16.7%) than for Suburban communities (11.1%). About a quarter of all respondents chose other descriptive terms to describe the communities that use their collections, the scope of which varies greatly. Support structures and mechanisms One of the main objectives of the User Survey was to gather feedback from Greenstone users and developers about the adequacy of current support structures and mechanisms and how this support might be improved or augmented in the future. Current support includes an active Greenstone Users mailing list, which is primarily for those who install and use greenstone to build digital collections, a Developers mailing list, and more recently a Spanish language mailing list and one for version 3 of the Greenstone software. There are also users and developers manuals available in several languages, example collections online, an archive of the users and developers mailing lists, demonstrations and workshops at conferences, and there have been a number of workshops and training courses sponsored by various organizations in a number of different countries. Half of the 40 survey questions

18 focused on issues related to support and awareness of Greenstone. Though many of the open ended questions in this section require more analysis, results from other support-related questions and observations drawn from open ended questions are offered here. When asked how they learned to use Greenstone and to rate the usefulness of several different learning tools, including the manuals, mailing lists, consulting with more experienced users inside their organization, consulting with more experienced users from outside their organization, or from training courses, respondents gave ing lists and manuals the highest marks. On a scale of 1-3, ing lists received an average rating of 2.47 and manuals, 2.29 (see Figure 5). When asked what could be done to improve these support tools, many people said that they did not think the ing lists need a change. Some indicated that they thought the archives could be organized to allow access by subject, and a few said that they would like questions posted to the ing lists answered on a more cooperative level. That is, they thought that though the support they received from the Greenstone team at the University of Waikato was very helpful and informative, they saw value in moving to a model where other list members would be more engaged in answering questions as well. With regard to the Greenstone manuals, one improvement suggested by respondents was the addition of tutorials. In the time since the Survey, the Greenstone development team has formally requested and encouraged broader participation by other list members in answering questions, and has also made a set of step-by-step tutorials available via the Greenstone website. Figure 5: Average rating of learning methods.

19 In four separate questions that survey respondents were required to answer in order to submit the survey, the survey asked whether there was: (1) enough awareness of Greenstone in their country, (2) adequate training available on Greenstone in their country, (3) adequate awareness of existing Greenstone collections in their country, and (4) adequate support for developing Greenstone collections. By a solid majority, from 68% to 78%, the response to each of these questions was No. When asked how shortfalls in each area might be overcome, ideas offered in reply to each of these questions show some overlap, which might suggest that participants also see overlap in the issues of awareness of the software, training, support, and awareness of collections built with Greenstone. A couple of common threads in suggestions made for overcoming these shortfalls were to have local experts, support organizations, and local training opportunities. Regarding awareness of Greenstone, increased exposure to the software was cited several times as being important, such as would be provided if more institutions adopted Greenstone or if information about Greenstone were shared more with different types of organizations for example, one person suggested Greenstone be promoted to small public libraries in the United States and also increasing visibility at conferences, in workshops, and other public forums. Some respondents said they were not familiar with what training or other learning opportunities were currently available. A detailed list of training and learning opportunities, including contact information for organizations other than the University of Waikato that may provide Greenstone training was posted to the Greenstone website subsequent to the survey. Several survey respondents said they planned to share the expertise they have gained with Greenstone with others in their region. Respondents were required to answer two other questions. One questions addressed the adequacy of support for adapting Greenstone to the needs in the respondent s country, the other whether a national Greenstone support organization or association of Greenstone users exists in their country or region. Unlike the previous 4 required questions, response to the first of these questions was split, with 43% indicating there was enough support for adapting Greenstone to their country and 57% that there was not. 18.5% of respondents were aware of a support organization or association in their country or region. Conclusion To date, there has not been a formal mechanism to learn about who is using Greenstone, where, in what capacity, and their needs for support. The Greenstone User Survey has given us the opportunity to render a rough sketch of Greenstone users and developers and their needs for support. With further analysis, this data may give us a more accurate portrait of users and developers, and may also enable us to devise new strategies or approaches in efforts to develop sustainable support networks. Already, steps have been made to provide a number of support services survey respondents thought they

20 would find useful, including the provision of tutorials, more information about learning and training opportunities, and encouragement for a broader spectrum of list members to be actively involved in answering ing list questions. References Greenstone Digital Library Software. Retrieved June 24, 2005, from WRLC Libraries Digital and Special Collections. Retrieved June 24, 2005, from Zhang, Allison B., & Gourley, Don (2003). A Digital Collections Management System Based On Open Source Software. Retrieved June 24, 2005, from Washington Research Library Consortium Web site: Zhang, Allison B., (2003). Customizing the Greenstone User Interface. Retrieved June 24, 2005, from Washington Research Library Consortium Web site: Powell, Andy (2000). DC-dot. Retrieved June 24, 2005 from: Chopin Early Editions. The University of Chicago Library. Retrieved June 28, 2005, from Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS). Library of Congress Network Development and MARC Standards Office. Retrieved June 28, 2005, from Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS). Library of Congress Network Development and MARC Standards Office. Retrieved June 28, 2005, from METS profiles. Library of Congress Network Development and MARC Standards Office. Retrieved June 29, 2005, from