The Alexandria Digital Library Architecture

Abstract. Since 1994, the Alexandria Digital Library Project has developed three prototype digital libraries for georeferenced information. This paper describes the most recent of these efforts, a three-tier client-server architecture that relies heavily on a middleware layer to present a single uniform set of interfaces to multiple heterogeneous servers. These standard interfaces, all of which are implemented in HTTP, support session management, collection discovery and evaluation, metadata searching, metadata retrieval, and online holding retrieval. An XML-based metadata encoding scheme and a simple boolean query language have also been developed. The architecture described by these interfaces has been implemented at UCSB. 1 ADL Background The Alexandria Project [1] is a consortium of researchers, developers, and educators, spanning the academic, public, and private sectors, exploring a variety of problems related to distributed digital libraries for georeferenced information. Distri...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ERCIMDL
• Authors: James Frew, Michael Freeston, Nathan Freitas, Linda L. Hill, Greg Janee, Kevin Lovette, Robert Nideffer, Terence R. Smith, Qi Zheng
• Keywords: Alexandria Digital Library, Digital Libraries, Digital Library Project, Education, ERCIMDL 1998