A Component-Based Digital Library Service for Finding Missing Documents

Providing access to the full text of cataloged articles is a highly desirable feature for a digital library. However, in many such systems, not all metadata records have (a direct pointer to) a corresponding full-text document. In this paper, we present a new service for finding missing documents from digital library catalogs. This service is implemented as a software component in order to be readily deployable to existing systems. It works as a parameterized meta-search engine and allows digital library administrators to easily set up a search strategy, i.e., a list of existing search engines to be queried for the missing document, as well as the filtering and ranking policies to be applied to the results retrieved by each engine. We present a performance evaluation of our service with respect to its efficiency and the effectiveness of a suggested search strategy for collections in the computer science and in the biomedical and life sciences fields.