Addressing the Challenge of Managing Large-scale Digital Multimedia Libraries

Traditional Digital Libraries require human editorial control over the lifecycles of digital objects contained therein. This imposes an inherent (human) overhead on the maintenance of these digital libraries, which becomes unwieldy once the number of important information units in the digital library becomes too large. A revised framework is needed for digital libraries that takes the onus off the editor and allows the digital library to directly control digital object lifecycles, by employing a set of transformation rules that operate directly on the digital objects themselves. In this paper we motivate and describe a revised digital library framework that utilises transformation rules to automatically optimise system resources. We evaluate this library in three scenarios and also outline how we could apply concepts from this revised framework to address other challenges for digital libraries and digital information access in general. Categories: H. Information Systems H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL H.3.7 Digital Libraries Subject descriptor: Systems issues