Greenstone tutorial exercise
Working with a pre-packaged collection (Digital Libraries in Education)
You will need the Greenstone Digital Libraries in Education CD-ROM
Installing a pre-packaged collection
- Insert your CD-ROM for the course Digital libraries in education into a Windows computer. If the installation process does not start up straightaway (because the AutoPlay feature is disabled on your computer), navigate to your CD-ROM/DVD drive (normally D:), open the folder prebuilt, and double click on Setup.exe.
- During installation you are offered a choice of folder to install in: we recommend the default, which is C:\GSDL.
- You are also presented with the option to run Greenstone from the CD-ROM or to copy the entire CD-ROM. We recommend the latter: please check the box that says Install all collection files. It will take at least a couple of minutes to copy the files across.
- Finally, the installer offers to install the Netscape browser for you. Do not request this except in the unlikely event that you do not already have a web browser on your computer.
CD-ROMs like this one that contain pre-packaged Greenstone collections do not include the full Greenstone software. Instead they embody a mini version of Greenstone that allows you to view the collection but not to build new ones.
Browsing around a Greenstone collection
- To run Greenstone, open the Windows Start menu, Programs, and select Greenstone, then the sub-menu item Digital Libraries in Education: then <Enter Library>.
- Click the Digital libraries in Education collection's icon. This takes you to the collection's home page, often called the "about" page.
The home page contains an access bar with buttons called search, contents, authors a-z, modules, and acronyms. This access bar is the key to finding information in any Greenstone collection.
- Click <authors a-z>. A list of bookshelf icons appears. Click the one called Marchionini, G. to see the two course readings by Gary Marchionini.
- One of these items is a PDF file and the other is an HTML file. Click them both in turn to open up the documents.
- Click the <contents> button in the access bar. This shows two bookshelves, one for this Study Guide and the other for the Course Readings. Choose one and look at what it contains.
- Clicking a bookshelf that is open closes it. Close the bookshelf you have just opened and then choose the other one and examine its contents.
- Click <acronyms> in the access bar and find the meaning of the acronym "LOM".
- Click <search> and search for the word "LOM". Check out the difference between searching text and searching titles (use the pull-down box on the search page).
- Click the collection icon Digital Libraries in Education at the top left. This takes you back to the collection's about page.Beneath the access bar on the collection's about page is a search box (just the same as the one that appears on the search page), a description of the collection under the heading About this collection, and instructions on how to find information in this collection.Above the access bar is the collection's icon, saying Digital Libraries in Education. On the right is an icon saying about, above which are three buttons, home, help, and preferences.
- Click <home>. This returns you to the Greenstone home page.
- Return to the collection (by clicking its icon), and click <help>. This gives more information about how to access the collection.
- Click <preferences>. This takes you to a page where you can change some of the settings.
- Now explore the collection by navigating freely around it. Click liberally: all images that appear on the screen are clickable. If you hold the mouse stationary over an image, most browsers will soon pop up a brief "mouse-over" message that tells you what will happen if you click. Experiment! Choose common words like "the" or "and" to search for—that should evoke some response, and nothing will break. (Note: unlike many search systems, Greenstone indexes all words, including these ones.)
Exercise: Read the Help page; then answer these questions
- What does this collection contain?
- Name five ways to navigate to a target document in this collection.
- How many documents in the collection are written by Erik Duval?
- Compare the number of times the words "he" and "she" appear in the collection.
- How many times does the word "metadata" appear in titles? In the text itself?
- What's the difference between a some and an all search?
- What does "MODS" stand for?
- How do you switch the interface from English to Russian? Does it stay in Russian when you go to the Greenstone home page?
- Find a search term that yields different results depending on whether you have ignore word endings or whole word must match set on the Preferences page.
- What's the difference between Graphical and Textual interface format (on the Preferences page)?
Exercise: Use the How to build a digital library collection to answer these questions.
- How many sentences contain the word education?
- What story from the School Journal collection is featured in the book?
- How many acronyms used in the book begin with the word Standard?
- What does tapu mean?
- How many times does the word library appear? The word libraries?
- How many times does Library appear with an initial capital letter?
- How many times does some derivative of the word form appear?
- Name an English poem that was probably written in about 1000 A.D.
- Who is Alan Kay?
- On what page is the first mention of some aspect of Chinese culture?
Most of these questions would be rather difficult to answer from the printed book.