greenstone digital library user's guide - Index of

30 MAKING GREENSTONE COLLECTIONS
Building the collection
Previewing
Plug-ins and classifiers have many different arguments or “options” that
the user can supply. The dialog box in Figure 13 shows the user
specifying arguments to some of the plug-ins. The grayed-out fields
become active when the user adds the option by clicking the tick-box
beside it. Because Greenstone is a continually growing open-source
system, the number of options tends to increase as developers add new
facilities. To help cope with this, Greenstone has a “plug-in information”
utility program that lists the options available for each plug-in, and the
librarian interface automatically invokes this to determine what options to
show. This allows the interactive user interface to automatically keep
pace with developments in the software.
The Create panel (Figure 14) is used to construct a collection based on
the documents and assigned metadata. The brunt of this work is borne by
the Greenstone code itself. The user controls this external process through
a series of separate interaction screens, each dealing with the arguments
provided to a certain stage of the creation process.
The user observes the building process though a window that shows not
only the text output generated by Greenstone’s importing and indexbuilding
scripts, but also progress bars that indicate the overall degree of
completion of each script.
Figure 14 shows the Create view. At the top are shown some options that
can be applied during the creation process. The user selects appropriate
values for the options. This figure illustrates a popup “tool tip” that is
available throughout the interface to explain the function of each
argument.
When satisfied with the arguments, the user clicks Build Collection.
Greenstone continually prints text that indicates progress, and this is
shown along with a more informative progress bar.
The Preview Collection button (Figure 14) is used to view the collection
that has been built. Clicking this button launches a web browser showing
the home page of the collection (Figure 15). In practice, previewing often
shows up deficiencies in the collection design, or in the individual
metadata values, and the user frequently returns to earlier stages to correct
these. This button becomes active once the collection has been created.
The newly created collection will also have been installed on your
Greenstone home page as one of the regular collections.