Greenstone is a suite of software which has the ability to serve digital library collections and build new collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. For more information, read the Greenstone Fact Sheet. There is a brief history of the Greenstone project here.

Greenstone is open-source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Greenstone has been tested on Windows 3.1/3.11/95/98/Me/NT/2000, most distributions of GNU/Linux, Darwin (Mac OS X), Solaris, and FreeBSD. It should in fact work on any Windows or Unix system. If you use a system other than those mentioned and you find Greenstone doesn't run, please contact us.

Please note that the downloadable Windows distribution of Greenstone comes with an installer that will not work on 16 bit Windows. If you need to use Greenstone on Windows 3.1/3.11 please contact us.

There are two Greenstone mailing lists. You can subscribe to them from the Greenstone support page.

The most popular mailing list ([email protected]) is archived as a Greenstone collection at www.nzdl.org. Note that this collection is updated only sporadically so may not always be completely up to date.

We welcome contributions or improvements to the Greenstone software!

Before you send in any contribution, you first need to make sure that your changes are compatible with the latest snapshop of the Greenstone source code. To get the latest code you'll need to use Subversion (see the Greenstone_SVN page for details). You should then send the modified files, along with details of the modifications you've made, to [mailto:[email protected] [email protected]].

Before beginning work, you should announce what you're doing on the [mailto:[email protected] greenstone developer's list] to tell us what you plan to do and get some feedback.