The Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project was funded from
three coordinated proposals, from
The University of California at Berkeley
UCB,
the University of California at Santa Barbara UCSB,
and Stanford University. One of our major goals is
to demonstrate our technologies on the emerging California Digital
Library,
CDL and to implement and evaluate these technologies on
a testbed system to be built with the help of the
San Diego Supercomputer Center, SDSC.
All three projects together yield a synergistic and
comprehensive digital libraries project.
The Stanford component of this effort will develop the base
technologies that are
required to overcome the most critical barriers to effective digital
libraries. One of these barriers is the heterogeneity of information and
services. Another impediment is the lack of powerful filtering mechanisms
that let users find truly valuable information. The continuous access to
information is restricted by the unavailability of library interfaces and
tools that effectively operate on portable devices. A fourth barrier is
the lack of a solid economic infrastructure that encourages providers to make
information available, and give users privacy guarantees. See the
summary for more information.
In November 1998, we spent some time to look back at our efforts of
our DLI1 research.
These ruminations led to a
publication and a
presentation.
Both are entitled: "Building the InfoBus. A Review of Technical Choices in the
Stanford Digital Library". We talk about infrastructure decisions, about
why USMARC in the end wasn't quite right for us, and about how deeply user
traditions impacted the details of our technical designs.
Our collection in DLI1 was primarily computing literature. However, we
also had a strong focus on networked information sources, meaning
that the vast array of topics found on the World Wide Web are
accessible through our project as well. At the heart of the DLI1 project
is the
testbed
running
the
"InfoBus" protocol, which provides a uniform way to access a
variety of services and information sources through "proxies" acting
as interpreters between the InfoBus protocol and the native protocol.
The InfoBus is implemented on top of a
CORBA-based architecture using
Inprise's Visibroker
and
Xerox's ILU.
With the InfoBus protocol running under the hood, a variety of
user level applications provide powerful ways to
find information, using cutting-edge
user interfaces for direct manipulation or through
Agent technology.
A second area of focus for the Stanford Digital Library Project is the
legal and economic issues of a networked environment.
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