A Distributed Digital Library System Architecture for Archive Metadata

The role of Digital Library Systems (DLSs) in collecting, managing and preserving our cultural heritage is increasingly preponderant in several contexts. In particular, DLSs are not merely the digital counterpart of traditional libraries, rather they can be seen as the technology of choice for managing the information resources of different kinds of organizations, which range from libraries, and museums to archives. We present a solution to address the problem of sharing metadata between different archives spread across a geographic region. In particular, we consider the Italian Veneto Region archives which promote a related project called Sistema Informativo Archivistico Regionale (SIAR) . The main goal of the SIAR project is to develop a DLS for sharing archive metadata spread across the territory. Archive metadata are geographically distributed across the Veneto Region and they are preserved in several local archives; in this context, independent, private or public local archives keep metadata without sharing them and this prevents the offering of common advanced services on metadata. The SIAR objective is to develop a DLS ables to provide advanced services on regional archive metadata, such as a full-text search. The SIAR design must take into consideration several issues: it has to preserve local archives autonomy and gather their metadata to perform advanced services. Moreover, the SIAR project has to be developed in the Italian Veneto Region context, considering various constraints imposed by the preexisting regional information systems. To design the SIAR DLS, we have to satisfy several requirements. On the one hand we have to guarantee the local bodies maintain archives management autonomy. On the other, we have to build up regional coordination so Veneto Region can have an integrated global vision of local archives participating in SIAR. The added value of the SIAR is that DLS shares metadata exploiting advanced Digital Library (DL) technology that can be integrated and adapted with pre-existing systems using different technologies. The result is a scalable, adaptive, flexible and widely-adoptable architecture to share information in a distributed environment. Section II explains SIAR design choices. Section III discusses two works related to the SIAR project. Section IV presents the SIAR DLS architecture. Section V describes SIAR prototype development details and section VI concludes and discusses the future developments of SIAR.