Open-source is becoming an increasingly popular software development method. This paper reports a usability study of the open-source Greenstone Digital Library collection-building software. The problems highlighted by the study are analysed to identify their likely source within the social context of Greenstone's development environment. We discuss how characteristics of open-source software development influence the usability of resulting software products. IntroductionOpen-source is becoming an increasingly popular software development method, producing successful software such as the Linux operating system and the Apache web server. Open-source software is popular with technically sophisticated users, who are often also the software developers, and has not yet made a significant impact on the desktop of most users. This paper starts to address this issue through a usability study of the open-source Greenstone Digital Library Software. The inter-disciplinary nature of Greenstone's target users provide an interesting (and relatively rare) test case for the generality of opensource development methods.The paper begins with a brief overview of the Greenstone software, and open-source projects in general. We then describe the results of a usability study of collection-building using Greenstone. The problems highlighted by the study are analysed to identify their likely sources within Greenstone's development environment. We then discuss how characteristics of open-source software development influence the usability of the resulting software. GreenstoneGreenstone is an open-source software system for building, maintaining and serving digital library collections [10]. It runs on a wide variety of platforms and provides full-text mirroring, indexing, searching, browsing and metadata extraction. With features that have evolved out of honours, masters and PhD research projects, most of the development is done within the New Zealand Digital Library (NZDL) research group at the University of Waikato.No individual decides which features are added to the system, instead a technical consensus among the key developers guides overall direction and individual developers work on features and functionality that are useful to them. A single full-time programmer works on bug-fixing and small external contracts. Valuable use-cases are derived from researchers own research and digital library use presented at conferences and in journals as well as end-user feedback. Although most developers are on-site, external developers (including users) also contribute to the software. A lack of a controlling manager is typical of open source development environments, with developers usually only having to show technical ability and willingness to work on the project before they are granted access to the source code.Greenstone has two classes of users: those who build collections and those who access collections as end-users. Librarians are an important group of potential collection-builders but Greenstone is aimed at anyone who wants to...

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A brief introduction to acronyms is given and motivation for extracting them in a digital library environment is discussed. A technique for extracting acronyms is given with an analysis of the results. The technique is found to have a low number of false negatives and a high number of false positives. Introduction Digital library research seeks to build tools to enable access of content, while making as few as possible assumptions about the content, since assumptions limit the range of applicability of the tools. Generally, the broader the assumptions the more widely applicable the tools. For example, keyword based indexing [5] is based on communications theory and applies to all natural human textual languages (allowances for differences in character sets and similar localisation issues not withstanding) . The algorithm described in this paper makes much stronger assumptions about the content. It assumes textual content that contains acronyms, an assumption which is known to hold for...