Dienst: Building a Production technical Report Server

Dienst is a protocol and implementation that provides Internet access to a distributed, decentralized multi-format document collection. It supports full text and boolean searches, thumbnail visual browsing, onscreen reading, and printing. In this paper we describe a number of issues that arose as we developed Dienst, including copyright policy, document management, and handling multiple formats of documents, and then lay out a number of areas where we still need to make progress, including interoperability among heterogeneous search engines, reliability, logical document structuring, and technology transfer.