A Web-Based Resource Discovery Architecture for Digital Archive Systems

In past several years, researchers, archival organizations and institutes invested efforts in constructing digital archives. Nowadays, there are rich digital archives distributed in many archival systems. However, to retrieve archival contents from these systems, users must be familiar to the system’s URL address, the user interface and functions provided by the system, since no single Web site (like the portal site) was provided to users in the digital archive environment. Therefore, digital archives are still hard to be accessed by general users. In this paper, based on our system “Knowledge Portal (KP)”, we propose the resource discovery architecture to facilitate the interoperability among diverse digital archive systems or other information systems. In the architecture, we follow the Dublin Core (DC) Metadata Element Set as the standard of exchanging the information. Using DC fields, diverse metadata of archives are integrated into the common format with single retrieval interface. Organizing catalogues to construct a global view for diverse contents is also considered in this paper. Based on the OAI framework, the OAI-PMH is implemented and integrated with the directory engine of KP to provide an integrated view of archives. Since KP is also a platform of Web portal site, resources available from the Web can also be managed, indexed and retrieved in the environment. That is we achieve a We-based portal as the discovering architecture not only for digital archives but also for the public Web resources. Based on the system, Web resources and digital archives can be seamlessly integrated in the same portal and users are able to access both resources simultaneously.