Arms, W.Y.; Blanchi, C.; Overly, E.A.: ¬An architecture for information in digital libraries (1997)
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- Abstract
- Flexible organization of information is one of the key design challenges in any digital library. For the past year, we have been working with members of the National Digital Library Project (NDLP) at the Library of Congress to build an experimental system to organize and store library collections. This is a report on the work. In particular, we describe how a few technical building blocks are used to organize the material in collections, such as the NDLP's, and how these methods fit into a general distributed computing framework. The technical building blocks are part of a framework that evolved as part of the Computer Science Technical Reports Project (CSTR). This framework is described in the paper, "A Framework for Distributed Digital Object Services", by Robert Kahn and Robert Wilensky (1995). The main building blocks are: "digital objects", which are used to manage digital material in a networked environment; "handles", which identify digital objects and other network resources; and "repositories", in which digital objects are stored. These concepts are amplified in "Key Concepts in the Architecture of the Digital Library", by William Y. Arms (1995). In summer 1995, after earlier experimental development, work began on the implementation of a full digital library system based on this framework. In addition to Kahn/Wilensky and Arms, several working papers further elaborate on the design concepts. A paper by Carl Lagoze and David Ely, "Implementation Issues in an Open Architectural Framework for Digital Object Services", delves into some of the repository concepts. The initial repository implementation was based on a paper by Carl Lagoze, Robert McGrath, Ed Overly and Nancy Yeager, "A Design for Inter-Operable Secure Object Stores (ISOS)". Work on the handle system, which began in 1992, is described in a series of papers that can be found on the Handle Home Page. The National Digital Library Program (NDLP) at the Library of Congress is a large scale project to convert historic collections to digital form and make them widely available over the Internet. The program is described in two articles by Caroline R. Arms, "Historical Collections for the National Digital Library". The NDLP itself draws on experience gained through the earlier American Memory Program. Based on this work, we have built a pilot system that demonstrates how digital objects can be used to organize complex materials, such as those found in the NDLP. The pilot was demonstrated to members of the library in July 1996. The pilot system includes the handle system for identifying digital objects, a pilot repository to store them, and two user interfaces: one designed for librarians to manage digital objects in the repository, the other for library patrons to access the materials stored in the repository. Materials from the NDLP's Coolidge Consumerism compilation have been deposited into the pilot repository. They include a variety of photographs and texts, converted to digital form. The pilot demonstrates the use of handles for identifying such material, the use of meta-objects for managing sets of digital objects, and the choice of metadata. We are now implementing an enhanced prototype system for completion in early 1997.
