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Next Generation Distributed Digital Library

The Cornell Digital Library Research Group (CDLRG) is involved in the design, implementation, and deployment of a next generation digital library system. This system will consist of a collection of distributed services, all with open CORBA-based interfaces, that can be flexibly and adaptively combined to create for users the illusion of a single library collection. The architecture is extensible to a wide variety of objects – from simple digitized text to compound multi-media documents and "live" documents such as software simulations. As part of a broader collaboration with the Cornell University Libraries, our goal is to deploy this system as the technical infrastructure of a multi-discipline university-wide digital collection.

To date, most of the CDLRG’s research has focused on the NCSTRL library, a primarily text-based collection maintained on-line at over 80 sites around the world. To begin extending the test-bed into multi-media areas, Cornell University Library’s Digital Access Coalition will use the proposed Intel Architecture systems to create new digitized visual information resources. Images will be drawn from the collections of Cornell’s two slide libraries, the library’s special collections, and Cornell’s Johnson Art Museum. The project intends to make digital representations of the over 27,000 works housed in the Museum, beginning with works on paper, the heart of the museum’s holdings. Once the print collection is digitized, the project will move onto other works on paper, three-dimensional objects, and other holdings.

This collection will provide new challenges for the foundation services of our current digital library architecture. It will impact the architecture of both repositories, which allow the deposit, storage, and retrieval of both simple and complex (multi-part and distributed) objects and indexes, which provide both full-text and surrogate (metadata) search over the contents of one or more repositories. Our longer-term goal is to extend these repositories to capture the full range of intellectual content housed and generated at the university, from technical reports and papers, to existing collections of material ranging from bird songs to crop databases, to new works of digital art.

Participants

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Last modified on: 07/30/99