A Satellite Technology Digital Library: Experiences with “Greenstone Digital Library Software”

Enormous information in the form of minutes of meetings, reports, newspaper clippings, articles in the in-house publication (Journal of Spacecraft Technology), papers for publication and for presentation in conferences, drawings, photographs etc., are regularly generated at ISRO Satellite Centre (ISAC), Bangalore. Gleaning these contents for there effective management and delivery of services, and developing a comprehensive archive has become very important. These contents are in a variety of form and formats like text, still images, audio and video records, etc. They are already catalogued using library management software (Libsys). However the contents as such dealing with satellite technology need to be further organized with categorization and metadata with appropriate digital library software. This paper describes some practical experiences in building a digital library using Greenstone Digital Library Software (GSDL) and highlights issues that arise in the process. It also discusses selection and installation of on digital library software, steps involved in content gleaning using Greenstone Librarian Interface (GLI), metadata, handling of different document types, customization, administrative functions and few advantages and limitations of GSDL