Hello Elliot,
having taken the plunge into Greenstone myself just a couple of weeks ago, I might be in a position to answer a couple of your questions.
- Getting started with Greenstone is relatively easy, and you won't need much experience in programming at all to set up a simple collection. Fairly low level knowledge about your operating system & webserver, Java installation, path variables, HTML/CSS and some basic programming concepts such as conditional statements and variables are more than enough. More important is an understanding of your content, how you plan to index it and a kind of map of what metadata will actually be entered, saved and imported.
- I'm not very sure about the exact procedure on this one, sorry. As far as I know Greenstone supports multilingual collections directly, the user agent (web browser) determines what page is viewed once the various interfaces have been activated. The import plugins and Greenstone itself should work fine with any language, because it is all Unicode based.
- You have several options here. Typically, for a publicly available collection, you can set up Greenstone on a webserver, and the webserver simply serves the content generated by the library executable. However, this means that all the collection building must be done on the server, which sucks if you dont have direct access to it. Remote Desktop (or something like it) is an option, but you can also install Greenstone locally and run your builds there, then upload them to the server using any means you have (network, FTP, email the webmaster, etc.). You will need to install Greenstone on the webserver though, because the content is generated on the fly.
Hopefully I didn't get too much of that wrong!
Cheers
Leon
On 5/24/06, elliot <infoctr@netvision.net.il
> wrote:
Hello people in Greenstone support,
Forgive my seeming professional ignorance,
but...before I take the plunge into Greenstone:
1. What are the basic competencies needed for using
the Greenstone program in an efficient manner?
- What prior programming languages are
needed?
- Or other knowledge needed (IE, Dublin
Core?)
2. In order to handle a small
dual-language collection of English and Hebrew-language PDF and Word files,
what is the downloading procedure -- for example, downloading the main
Greenstone package, then doing necessary cataloging, then downloading the Hebrew
package? Or do I have it wrong?
3. Finally, a question regarding uploading--which I
did not see addressed outright in the documentation:
- Does the Greenstone package include an FTP upload
program, and if not, how is my collection to be uploaded to the
Web?
- Assuming Greenstone allows for uploading onto the
web, do I need my own domain name, or can I attach it onto my organization's
website? Or is there a third-party Web host for Greenstone
collections?
Being new to virtual libraries, I do thank you
all for any useful information or links you can help me out
with,
Elliot Lazerwitz
Israel Family Planning Association
Tel Aviv
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