I would like to make aware of the Greenstone community the effort being made to incorporate the Amharic language, the most widely spoken language in Ethiopia and official language of of the Federal Government of Ethiopia, into the Greenstone Digital Library Software. This effort is being done by volunteers (Yohannes Mulugeta and Abiyot Bayou) as Amharic language maintainers on Greenstone in collaboration with UNESCO Cluster Office in Addis Ababa.

As part the first success, the volunteers have successfully translated the Core Interface and the Auxiliary Interface into Amharic language and sent them back to the Greenstone developers for generation of the macro files. I believe that, this is a leap forward for the development of digital libraries of Amharic collections using Greenstone. Other efforts are being underway to:

- establish Greenstone Support for Ethiopia (East Africa)
- prepare Greenstone manuals in Amharic language
- prepare Demo of Amharic language digital library collections for distribution with Greenstone.

Best regards,
Yohannes Mulugeta
Greenstone Amharic Language Maintainer
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Yohannes Mulugeta
Head, Computer and Information Retrival Center
Addis Ababa University Libraries
P.O.Box: 1176
Addis Ababa
Ethiopia

e-mail: yohannesmulu<AT>yahoo.com
yohannesmulu<AT>gmail.com
cell phone: (251-91)-139-5572

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