Extensible Digital Library User Portals for e- Infrastructures

Large scale Digital Library e-Infrastructures are emerging as a new approach for facilitating the development of Digital Libraries (DLs) serving diverse user communities with specific and continuously evolving requirements. Such an approach promotes the building of large-scale DLs via the dynamic, automated management of highly-distributed DL resources – e.g. collections of information objects, services, computing and storage resources – and enforcing controlled sharing of such resources across different DLs. This paper discusses an extensible and new approach for User Interfaces development, facilitating the sharing and reuse of UI resources, i.e. user interface constituents. In particular a design model and a concrete implementation, carried out in the context of DILIGENT and D4Science projects is presented in detail.