Summary of the Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project

The goal of the Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project is to design and implement the infrastructure and services needed for collaboratively creating, disseminating, sharing and managing information in a digital library context. 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.

The Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project will develop the mechanisms for surmounting these barriers, making world-wide, interoperable, and usable digital libraries a reality. In particular:

1. We will build InterServ, a suite of protocols and models for the interoperation of heterogeneous collections and services. We will build on our experience with the current Stanford InfoBus, extending it to handle services and dynamic information artifacts such as applets and plug-ins. We will also provide facilities for enhancing the reliability of complex, interoperable library systems.
2. We will develop value filtering mechanisms that can find information based on its value, as opposed to simply its textual similarity to some query terms. The value functions we will integrate include ones based on user opinions, on access patterns, and on the context where the information appears.
3. We will build services and tools for continuous access to information, making it possible for users to access digital libraries in a convenient way from mobile, handheld devices.
4. We will design and implement a scalable economic infrastructure for digital libraries. This infrastructure will provide mechanisms for integrating different payment mechanisms and for protecting intellectual property, across different services and platforms. It will also provide tools that facilitate the design of secure digital library workflows.

Our technologies will be fully implemented and evaluated on a testbed system, to be built, with the help of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Some of our technologies will also by transferred to the CDL, the Stanford Libraries, and to some of our other partners. For our evaluations, we will work with extensive collections provided by Stanford partners, by UCB and UCSB, and by the CDL.

The main thrust of our project will be technology creation, evaluation and deployment. Our research will be driven by user and societal requirements, with the clear goal to provide technologies that users need and can manage. We will also play an active role in proposing "standard" protocols, models and mechanisms for interoperation, filtering, and safeguarding intellectual property across this collaboration and across the digital library community.