Greenstone tutorial exercise

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Sample files: beatles.zip
Devised for Greenstone version: 2.60|3.06
Modified for Greenstone version: 2.87|3.08

Looking at a multimedia collection

  1. Copy the entire folder

    sample_files → beatles → advbeat_large

    (with all its contents) into your Greenstone collect folder. If you have installed Greenstone in the usual place, this is

    My Computer → Local Disk (C:) → Users → <Username> → Greenstone → collect

    where <Username> is the username under which Greenstone is installed.

    Put advbeat_large in there.

  1. On Windows, if the Greenstone Digital Library Local Library Server is already running, re-start it by clicking the world icon on the task bar and then pressing Restart Library. On Linux and Mac, just do a forced reload/refresh of the web browser (eg. by pressing Shift and the refresh button in Firefox to do a forced reload). If the Local Library Server hasn't been started yet, start it up first by selecting Greenstone Digital Library from the Start menu on Windows, or run ./gs-server.sh on Linux and Mac.

  1. Explore the Beatles collection. Note how the Browse button divides the material into seven different types. Within each category, the documents have appropriate icons. Some documents have an audio icon: when you click these you hear the music (assuming your computer is set up with appropriate player software). Others have an image thumbnail: when you click these you see the images.

  1. Look at the Titles browser. Each title has a bookshelf that may include several related items. For example, Hey Jude has a MIDI file, lyrics, and a discography item.

  1. Observe the low quality of the metadata. For example, the five items under A Hard Day's Night (under "H" in the Titles browser) have different variants as their titles. The collection would have been easier to organize had the metadata been cleaned up manually first, but that would be a big job. Only a tiny amount of metadata was added by hand—fewer than ten items. The original metadata was left untouched and Greenstone facilities were used to clean it up automatically. (You will find in Building a multimedia collection that this is possible but tricky.)

  1. In the file browser, take a look at the files that make up the collection, in the

    sample_files → beatles → advbeat_large → import

    folder. What a mess! There are over 450 files under seven top-level sub-folders. Organization is minimal, reflecting the different times and ways the files were gathered. For example, html_lyrics and discography are excerpts of web sites, and images contains various images in JPEG format. For each type, drill down through the hierarchy and look at a sample document.


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