Regional Digital Library Network Specification
Draft for review by the Northbay Initiative, May 2005
Following is a guide for the development of a regional environmental digital library network based on the principles promoted by the Information Commons initiative (http://info-commons.org).
I. Network Architecture Components:
1. Standard, accepted digital library archiving and indexing methods that allow for interoperability with other groups' information. In particular, standard methods for:
- describing organizations, projects, data, people, and other information resources;
- structuring data (e.g., catalog records, project descriptions)
- capturing vocabularies used in indexing and search/discovery;
- capturing ontologies for semantically linking and querying; and
- posting and harvesting all these components on an open network
2. Tools and methods for library development and administration that are free of license fees and independent of a particular software environment or contractor (although data contributors may choose to contract library development and maintenance tasks)
3. Harvesting and searching tools that act upon multiple relevant libraries (to be determined by the builder of the library) and that take advantage of openly-declared indexing vocabularies and ontologies and harvestable catalogs
4. Agreed-upon knowledge organization systems ( vocabularies) that capture the concepts, issues, and topics of the North Bay information communities. In particular:
- thesauri for themes, issues, resource types, place-names, species
- accepted lists of organization and people's names
- semantic linkages between library objects ( ontologies) such as "is creator of" and "funded by" to capture the patterns of information access by that community
5. All catalogs as well as indexing vocabularies and ontologies are offered as open systems (i.e., a server on the WWW where anyone can log in and access the full structure of the system) for others to use in their libraries, aggregation sites, and information applications.
II. Concepts and Terms:
- Data Contributor- An organization that creates, houses, and stewards data resources. Any member of the information community may offer their data using any combination of resources available and affordable to them, by following standard guidelines.
- Library- A collection created, updated, managed, and served by data contributors. Libraries share data, catalogs, and indexing structures passively using human and machine-readable services. Libraries may have a user interface for local users and also allow harvesting for aggregators and information applications, making their information work in several contexts while maintaining it in only one system. Materials in libraries may be licensed in various ways but catalogs and indexing systems are available free to the public in fully-structured standard formats.
- Regional Digital Library Network- A network of multiple open, networked, locally-relevant libraries that exchange data with each other and with libraries from outside the region (CaSIL, NRPI, and others).
- Information Community- Users and contributors with common interests and so a need for a particular subset of information based on thematic and geographic scope. Communities may overlap and nest in their interests, and multiple communities may make use of and contribute to the larger pool of information resources.
- Information Aggregator- An organization that harvests and compiles data from the network to provide a point of contact for state and national aggregators or to provide an Information Application. Any interested party may harvest the data resources and library structures for aggregation, analysis, or combination in new products and presentations.
- Information Application- A special application that taps into the networked information to provide access to data and information resources in community-relevant, online presentations, sometimes combined with a collaboration facility such as a communication portal.
Last modified by: D. DiPietro, May 10, 2005