Flexing Digital Library Systems

Digital library systems with monolithic architectures are rapidly facing extinction as the discipline adopts new practices in software engineering, such as component-based architectures and Web Services. Past projects have attempted to demonstrate and justify the use of components through the construction of systems such as NCSTRL and ScholNet. This paper describes current work to push the boundaries of digital library research and investigate a range of projects made feasible by the availability of suitable components. These projects include: the ability to assemble component-based digital libraries using a visual interface; the design of customisable user interfaces and workflows; the packaging and installation of systems based on formal descriptions; and the shift to a component farm for cluster-like scalability. Each of these sub-projects makes a potential individual contribution to research in architectures, while sharing a common underlying framework. Together, all of these projects support the hypothesis that a consistent component architecture and suite of components can provide the basis for advanced research into flexible digital library architectures.