DL Consulting recently became involved in a pilot project to introduce Greenstone to Southern Africa. Our commitment to this project includes the donation of time and expertise in helping to provide training in Greenstone (and more general digital library and digitization subjects) to institutions in Southern Africa. As part of the first stage of this pilot project I recently visited the National University of Science and Technology in Zimbabwe, the Lesotho College of Education, the University of Lesotho, and Bunda College of Agriculture in Malawi. My time in Africa was extremely positive, with lots of interest in and excitement about potential applications for digital library technologies like Greenstone. Each of these institutions, as well as the University of Namibia (who are the sub-regional coordinating centre) are now working on Greenstone-based digital collections.The next phase of the pilot project is a training course to be held at the University of Namibia in early October. This course will cover more advanced topics, following on from the basic training work we did when I visited each institution. Professor Ian Witten, head of the Greenstone project at the University of Waikato will be the trainer.For more information on the Southern African Greenstone project see the official project website.

After an email request, we’ve developed a new plugin, MetadataXMPPlug, to extract eXtensible Metadata Platform information from PDFs. The plugin is very basic – but should read most XMP information as long as it adheres to the RDF standard.

The neatest part of this project it that it makes use of Greenstone’s (relatively) new multipass import functionality. The MetadataXMPPlug is used during the metadata_read pass to extract metadata from PDF files, while the files themselves are handled by PDFPlug during the later import pass.

I finally remembered to add my paper on The Adoption of Open Source technologies in New Zealand to the main DLC site.  This was the final report for the first module of the Post Graduate Certificate in Professional Development (Electronics and ICT) that I’m currently undertaking.

While the report could probably do with some more polish, it does provide an interesting background to open source issues (such as intellectual property and copyright/left issues) and provides statistics and references which could be used as evidence in future contracts. Earned me an A too!