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.
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on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 1:09 pm and is filed under Community, Greenstone.
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October 9th, 2007 at 4:06 am
what software did you use to create the mets/alto files? how much was the investment in third party software?
October 9th, 2007 at 8:32 am
The METS/ALTO data (for the Papers Past collection) was sub-contracted to a third party, who use the docWORKS software from CCS in Germany (http://www.ccs-gmbh.de/). We work with this third-party regularly, as well as a number of other data conversion companies.
Unless you have an enormous amount of data to process (and even if you do) it probably makes sense for you to outsource the OCR work, rather than purchasing the software. Costs depend on the type and volume of materials, the accuracy required, and other factors. Generally speaking it doesn’t cost significantly more to process data to METS/ALTO than any other format however.