Distributed Digital Library Architecture Incorporating Different Index Styles

The New Zealand Digital Library offers several collections of information over the World Wide Web. Although fulltext indexing is the primary access mechanism, musical collections can also be accessed through a novel melody retrieval system. In offering this service over a three-year period, we have had to face many practical challenges in building, maintaining, and administering diverse collections of different kinds of information, involving different search and retrieval systems, with different user interfaces. This paper describes the design of the software we have built to support the service. Interface server programs provide a uniform interface between search engine and client, irrespective of the nature of the collection. Search engines that embody completely different index styles operate under a single distributed framework--we describe as examples MG, a full-text retrieval system, and MR, a melody retrieval system. A flexible protocol for communicating between an interface s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ADL
• Authors: Rodger J. McNab, Ian H. Witten, Stefan J. Boddie
• Keywords: ADL 1998, Digital Library, Melody Retrieval System, Retrieval System, Search Engines