Greenstone: A platform for distributed digital library applications

This paper examines the issues surrounding distributed Digital Library protocols. First, it reviews three prominent digital library protocols: Z39.50, SDLIP, and Dienst, plus Greenstone’s own protocol. Then, we summarise the implementation in the Greenstone Digital Library of a number of different protocols for distributed digital libraries, and describe sample applications of the same: a digital library for children, a translator for Stanford’s Simple Digital Library Interoperability Protocol, a Z39.50 client, and a bibliographic search tool. The paper concludes with a comparison of all four protocols, and a brief discussion of the impact of distributed protocols on the Greenstone system