[SCC_Active_Members] Notes about Greenstone

[H.M. Gladney]

Attachments FYI.  This communication is not intended to imply any
recommendation just now. 

Best wishes,  Henry

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Witten [mailto:ihw at cs.waikato.ac.nz] 
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2005 6:52 AM
To: hgladney at pacbell.net
Cc: John C. Toole; Allison Zhang; Stefan Boddie
Subject: Re: Query: suitable reference user institutions for Greenstone


On Oct 16, 2005, at 12:46 AM, H.M. Gladney wrote:

> Ian, I imagine that you know of the Computer History Museum (CHM).  If 
> not, you can find out about it at http://www.computerhistory.org/.

Yes, I visited it four years back; my good friend (and ex-colleague from the
University of Calgary) Mike Williams showed me around.

It would be great if you used Greenstone, and of course I think it would be
entirely suitable! However, although we have many users I'm not sure about
"museums of like scale". One active group is the Washington Research Library
Consortium; Allison Zhang has built many collections there and she might be
able to tell you of her experiences.

The place to start would be with a survey of the documents and metadata that
you already have available in electronic format, their formats etc. Then I'd
build a pilot collection (which should only take a few days, or even a few
yours). You'd probably be interested in our new version of the Greenstone
Librarian Interface that allows distributed people to work on a centralized
collections, adding documents and metadata (and even tweaking the collection
design); it has already been released to beta users and will be included in
the next Greenstone release.

If you wanted any commercial help with Greenstone there is a very good
company DL Consulting which has split off from our group (and it is entirely
independent of me!) that would be able to set up a pilot collection for you
at very reasonable rates; you could check them out on the web
(http://www.dlconsulting.co.nz/) and contact Stefan Boddie there
<stefan at dlconsulting.co.nz>. Alternatively we are able to do some custom
design at the University of Waikato (you should consider joining our Friends
of Greenstone program, see the "support" tab of greenstone.org).

Right now I'm visiting Google in New York for a few weeks, but unfortunately
I will not be able to get to California on this trip.

I do hope you end up using Greenstone for this project!
cheers
ian

>  CHM has started to work towards a software collection that will 
> parallel its hardware collection.  This collection intends to gather 
> all kinds of documents that might interest historians of the 
> information age, and volunteers have made a good start on that, e.g., 
> for Fortran.  Both the hardware collection and this software 
> collection will eventually be used as the base for virtual museum 
> services that parallel the physical museum and will probably attract 
> more visitors than can afford to travel to Silicon Valley.
>  
> Accomplishing this, of course, presupposes software infrastructure 
> whose characteristics you know better than almost anyone, and that I 
> will therefore not outline.  A small team has started looking into 
> tactics, strategy, and software for that--an approach that will work 
> well and is affordable as part of a museum of the size of CHM 
> (currently about 35 staff and over 200 active volunteers).  As part of 
> this, we are considering Greenstone, at least for interim use (a few
> years) until something larger is both needed and available.
>  
> We wonder what other museums of like scale are using Greenstone.  Does 
> someone on your team know?  Or can someone tell us how to identify 
> such institutions.  If we can find some candidates that we are 
> comfortable with as having similar needs and constraints as CHM, we 
> would establish verbal contact with them.
>  
> Best wishes, Henry
>  
> H.M. Gladney, Ph.D.     http://home.pacbell.net/hgladney/   HMG 
> Consulting
>  
> P.S.  You would find it enjoyable and worthwhile to spend a few hours 
> at CHM whenever you happen next to be in the San Francisco Bay area.
>