Building Infrastructures for Digital Libraries

Digital Libraries today are often monolithic systems. In the future, they will dissolve into collections of electronic services. The challenge will be to provide an infrastructure that supports the user in dealing with this multitude of services. Such an infrastructure should offer integrated access to the combined contents of multiple services, it should provide active dissemination of new contents, and it needs to support the users in locating and combining the services most suitable to their needs. In the Global Info program Infrastructures for Digital Libraries components of such an infrastructure are being developed. The federated query service DEMETRIOS and the alerting service HERMES are both integration services that combine underlying services, i.e., heterogenous information sources. The GIBRALTAR portal provides a meta-service that supports the user in locating and applying various Digital Library services.