Having collected the documents for the collection, annotated them with metadata, and designed how the collection will appear, you can now produce the collection using Greenstone. This section explains how.
The Create panel is used to create the collection by running Greenstone collection-building scripts on the information you have provided. Access the Create view by clicking the Create tab.
Clicking "Build Collection" initiates the collection building process. The time this takes depends on the size of the collection and the number of indexes being created (for huge collections it can be hours). A progress bar indicates how much of the process has been completed. To cancel the process at any time, click "Cancel Build". The lower part of the panel shows some output from the build process. The upper part shows some options for controlling the build process.
Once the collection has successfully built, clicking "Preview Collection" will launch a web browser showing the home page of the collection.
Sometimes things go wrong during collection building. Maybe some files couldn't be processed: the rest of the collection builds fine, and can be previewed, but some documents are absent. Or the whole collection is not built properly, in which case a message says "An error has occurred and the collection could not be created". When this happens, it may be helpful to switch the GLI into expert mode (File→Preferences→Mode, see Preferences), set the import and build "verbosity" options to 5, and rebuild, to see if there are any other error messages.
In Expert mode, you can use the "Message Log" entry at the left to review previous attempts to build the collection, whether successful or not. Select the log you want by clicking on the desired date in the "Log History" list.
In this mode, a full list of import and build options are shown in the Import and Build tabs to the left. The various settings are controlled just like the "Configuring Arguments" window described in the Plugins section. Some fields require numeric arguments, and you can type these in or use the arrows to increase or decrease the current value (in some cases, the interface restricts the range you can enter). Others are enabled by clicking a checkbox (click again to disable).
For more information about importing and building read Chapter 1 of the Greenstone Developer's Guide – Understanding the collection-building process.
Scheduled collection building is available in Expert mode. Some configuration needs to be done before this will work; see http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/Scheduled_Collection_Building_from_the_Librarian_Interface for details. The "Scheduling Options" tab on the left-hand side of the Create view shows a list of options controlling the scheduling process. The "schedule" option needs to be set for scheduling to be undertaken. The other options specifiy: the frequency of rebuild; whether to add a new schedule, update an existing one or delete the current schedule; and email details if you want email notification.