Building digital libraries from simple building blocks

Abstract

Metadata harvesting has been established by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) as a viable mechanism for connecting a provider of data to a purveyor of services. The Open Digital Library (ODL) model is an emerging framework which attempts to break up the services into appropriate components based also on the basic philosophy of the OAI model. This framework has been applied to various projects and evaluated for its simplicity, extensibility and reusability to support the hypothesis that digital libraries (DLs) should be built from simple Web Service-like components instead of as monolithic software applications.

Online Sheet Music Projects and Metadata from a Public Service Perspective

“…11 OAI-PMH is a method for exposing digital collections and requires that metadata be in some form of standard scheme-Dublin Core is required for descriptive metadata, although TEI, 8 MUSIC REFERENCE SERVICES QUARTERLY MARC, and other schemes may be incorporated. 12 If libraries have built their digital collections in Dublin Core and are otherwise OAI compliant, they can arrange to become a metadata provider. For those libraries already planning digital sheet music initiatives, including the elements necessary to make the data OAI compliant does not require extensive additional technological effort or resources.…”

Scenario-Based Generation of Digital Library Services

“…These best practices implement some of the ideas that were a part of the Kahn and Wilensky's Repository Access Protocol. These ideas have now been realized in OAI's broadly-supported DL interoperability protocol [28].…”

“…The aim of the protocol is to support the batch transfer of metadata from a server (data provider) to a client (service provider) using incremental updates whenever a transfer is initiated. This process of obtaining all the (new) metadata from a server, instead of only that which satisfies a search query, is commonly known as harvesting [28]. The OAI-PMH is made up of six requests and associated responses, three of which are administrative while the other 3 are for data transfer.…”

“…Web services perform functions, ranging from simple requests to complicated business processes. The ODL experiments have shown how web-based services can be used to effectively and efficiently create distributed systems to meet the needs of a particular community [28]. The 5SFramework needs to include such web-based services into the component pool.…”