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Greenstone (FOSS Digital Collections / Digital Library software)

Greenstone is a suite of software tools for building and distributing digital library collections on the Internet or CD-ROM. Greenstone is a multi-platform package for the assembling electronic documents into digital collections and for publishing these collections on the Web or on CD-ROM.

It accepts documents in a wide range of proprietary and standard formats, supports numerous standards for document and metadata exchange, including compliance with OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting), and readily converts bibliographic databases created under UNESCO's CDS/ISIS package into publishable digital libraries, including the full texts of the referenced documents if available. Greenstone may be used to create large, searchable collections of digital documents.

In addition to command line tools for digital collection building, Greenstone has a graphical Greenstone Librarians Interface (GLI) used to build collections and assign metadata. Through user selected plugins, Greenstone can import digital documents in formats including text, html, jpg, tiff, MP3, PDF, video, and Word, among others. The text, PDF, HTML and similar documents are converted into Greenstone Archive Format (GAF) which is an XML equivalent format. Versions available for Windows, OSX and Linux.

English, French, Spanish, Russian are the main languages of operation for Greenstone, but translations have been undertaken for many more, including Armenian, Arabic, Latvian, Mongolian, Nepali, Polish and Portuguese. It is issued under a GNU General Public License (GPL)