Reading Response - Week 2

The issues of interoperability raised by Payette et al. are of special interest to me - especially as they relate to digital libraries in the scientific domain. I have seen a need for work in this area while working with scientists on interdisciplinary research projects. Often investigators from different scientific backgrounds have different standards for data formatting which can result in a great deal of efficiency loss when data sharing occurs - due primarily to time spent reformatting data. The architecture proposed by Payette et al. (and by Arms et al. for that matter) not only could allow investigators to search for and share data more easily, but potentially could contain technology, in the form of disseminators, for data conversion (e.g. from one data format to another) in the data sharing process.

The extensibility and flexibility of the systems described in Payette et al. and Arms et al. would also be useful in the types of research work I have been involved with in the past. Historically, data sharing systems I have used have been static, which causes many a problem when switching from one project to another or when integrating new data into a project.

I also appreciate the basic principles of the architecture described by Arms et al.: the need for flexibility in the user interface, the need for straightforward collections management, and the need to keep the social, economic, and legal (and I would add technological to this list) frameworks in mind when developing the library. Quite important, in my experience, is the need for flexibility in the user interface. The interface must take into account as many of the potential needs of the user as possible is crucial. On the one hand, an overly focused interface may restrict the usability of the library. However, there is a limit to this flexibility; one should not generalize the system to an extent that makes it too general. The question is how to balance flexibility with applicability vis a vis the expected user base.

A few questions come to mind when reading these articles. Payette et al. and Suleman et al. are both about a decade old and both articles describe either prototype or early systems as examples of the architecture they describe. How have digital library architectures changed in the intervening years? Are the basic concepts the same as they were when these papers were written? Do we have any examples of large interoperable digital libraries that we can look at?

References:

Payette, S, Blanchi, C, Lagoze, C, Overly, EA. Interoperability for digital objects and repositories, The Cornell/CNRI Experiements. D-Lib Magazine, May 1999, Volume 5, Issue 5.

Suleman, H, and Fox, EA. A Framework for Building Open Digital Libraries, D-Lib Magazine, December 2001. Volume 7 Number 12.

Arms, WY, Blanchi, C, and Overly, EA. An Architecture for Information in Digital Libraries. D-Lib Magazine, February 1997.