Tutorial 10: How to build a digital library using open-source software

Instructor: Ian Witten

Time: Sunday, June 4 AM

Description

This tutorial describes how to build your own digital library using the Greenstone digital library software, a comprehensive, open-source system for constructing, presenting, and maintaining information collections. Collections built automatically include effective full-text searching and metadata-based browsing facilities that are attractive and easy to use. They are easily maintainable and can be rebuilt entirely automatically. Searching is full-text, and different indexes can be constructed (including metadata indexes). Browsing utilizes hierarchical structures that are created automatically from metadata associated with the source documents. Collections can include text, pictures, audio, and video. Documents can be in any language: Chinese and Arabic interfaces exist. Although primarily designed for Web access, collections can be made available, in precisely the same form, on CD-ROM or DVD. The system is extensible: software "plugins" accommodate different document and metadata types.

Instructor information

Ian H. Witten is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, and directs the New Zealand Digital Library project (where the Greenstone software originates). He has published widely in the areas of digital libraries, data compression, information retrieval, and machine learning. He is co-author of "Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and indexing documents and images" (second edition, Morgan Kaufmann 1999) and "Data mining: Practical machine learning tools and techniques with Java implementations" (Morgan Kaufmann, 2000), as well as many journal articles and conference papers. He is a Fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and a member of professional computing, information retrieval, and engineering associations in the UK, USA, Canada, and New Zealand.