Digital Library Service Integration

The investigators are developing a Digital Library Service Integration (DLSI) infrastructure to provide a systematic approach for integrating digital library collections and services. With this infrastructure, digital libraries will be able to share relevant services within a seamless, integrated interface. The project is integrating relatively simple services that may be used without modification. It is also exploring giving access to services that require customization, such as peer review, to a particular collection or community. Other contributions include incorporating collaborative filtering for customizing large sets of links, and developing advanced lexical analysis tools. Digital library collections and services generally will require minimal or no changes to plug into the DLSI infrastructure. With DLSI in place, users will see a totally integrated environment. They will use their digital library system just as before. But in addition, they will see supplemental link anchors, and when they click on one, they will be presented with a list of relevant links. The DLSI infrastructure will also filter and rank-order this set of generated links with respect to the user's preferences and current task. Digital library collections and services will gain several benefits from using DLSI: (1) Users will have direct access to related collections and services; this benefit, in effect, enlarges the feature set of a given collection or service. (2) Collections and services will gain much wider use, because DLSI linking will lead other users to them. (3) Users will become aware of a service or collection from seeing its links included in DLSI's list of links when using other collections and services. (4) DLSI will give the user direct, context-sensitive access to the features that a particular collection or service provides.