The steep price of high quality software prevents libraries from using them. To tackle this issue many library communities have developed software that are free of cost. They are known as free/open source software which are widely available on the internet, and can be downloaded, installed and distributed freely.

One such software is Greenstone Digital Library Software. It is for building and distributing digital library collections. It helps in organizing information on the web and as well as on CD-ROM. Its been developed by the New Zealand Digital Library project at Waikato University, and is distributed and promoted in cooperation with UNESCO and Human Info, an NGO. It is distributed under GNU general public licence.

After installing Greenstone Digital Library Software. One needs to build the digital library. For this go to 'the librarian Interface'. Click on 'file' and then 'new' to create a new database. Give an appropriate title to the collection. Briefly describe the collection and then click OK to continue. Gathering the documents - For this Click on local file space or home folder and look for greenstone folder where documents are stored. Choose the document you want to include in your collection. Drag the document to right hand side under the collection. And then enriching the document i.e providing appropriate metadata to each document. Dublincore metadata is used to describe the document.

For designing the document there are documents plugins, which helps to open the full text of the document. An appropriate plugin is required which will allow the document to open in that software  for e.g for word document word plugin is required. Search indexes are created through which reader can search in the document. Browsing classifiers are used for creating browsing options in the digital library collection and finally creating the digital library. Once a collection is build it is ready for searching and browsing. Besides this there is an option for customization of various features fulfilling specific user requirements.

This software is an effective way to automate the libraries collections.