Federating Digital Library Services for Advanced Applications in Science and Education

Abstract

Over the recent years numerous digital libraries have been deployed and enabled in the Internet with the use of various digital library frameworks. They contain valuable digital resources use of which is important to a large community of users, especially within the scientific and educational communities. The access to distributed digital resources has been a subject of research for a few years now. In this paper we present our own work in this area, discussing our approach at the distributed digital library platform that is widely used within the PIONIER optical network. We present the methodology for building distributed search and access to digital publications that allowed to create a national federation of digital libraries and that is now under investigation for possible use within various application fields including medicine, science and education.

PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation – Interoperability of Advanced Network Services Implemented on a Country Scale

“…The first version of the Federation had its premiere on 22-nd June, 2007 at the meeting of the PIONIER Consortium Supervisory Board in Kraków, Poland. Since this day the new network service has been made publicly available at http://fbc.pionier.net.pl/ [3].…”

RESTful atomic services for distributed digital libraries

“…Since 2002 at least 20 new institutional and regional digital libraries have been started. In 2007 the majority of those libraries were connected into Polish Digital Libraries Federation (http://fbc.pionier.net.pl, [1]) deployed in the PIONIER NREN. A crucial technical aspect of such federation is the interoperability between digital libraries, which must be assured on many levels -from the communication protocols to metadata schemas and taxonomies used to describe digital objects.…”