Week 2 - Reading Notes

Suleman and Fox: A Framework for Building Open Digital Libraries

In this reading, I really enjoyed the authors' clear articulation of principles to guide an Open Digital Library Design:

1.  All Digital Library services should be encapsulated within components that are extensions of Open Archives.
2. All access to the Digital Library services should be through their extended OAI interfaces.
3. The semantics of the OAI protocol should be extended or overloaded as allowed by the OAI protocol, but without contradicting the essential meaning.
4. All Digital Library services should get access to other data sources using the extended OAI protocol.
5. Digital Libraries should be constructed as networks of extended Open Archives.

However, my question is: Is OAI the acknowledged industry standard for interoperability between Digital Libraries? What is the difference between OAI-PMH and Dublin Core? Do those standards describe different things?

Arms, Blanchi, and Overy:  An Architecture for Information in Digital Libraries

This piece helped give me a clear understanding of the outline of information architecture in a digital library.I especially appreciated its definition of data types, structural metadata, and meta-objects. I liked the rules which were made at the outset:

1. All data is given an explicit data type.
2. All metadata is encoded explicitly.
3. Handles are given to individual items of intellectual property.
4. Meta-objects are used to aggregate digital objects.
5. Handles are used to identify items in meta-objects.

Because this article gave clear definitions to its outline, it provoked no questions from me.

Payette, Blanchi, Lagoze and Overly:  Interoperability for Digital Objects and Repositories: The Cornell/CNRI Experiments

This article had a great definition for interoperability:

   [I]nteroperability si defined as the ability of digital library components or services to be functionally and logically interchangeable by virtue of their having been implemented in accordance with a set of well-defined, publicly known interfaces. . . . When repositories and digital objects are created in this manner, the overall effect can be a federation of repositories that aggregate content with very different attributes, but that can be treated in the same manner due to their shared interface definitions.

My question is:  What are the best interoperability protocol standards for digital libraries today?  Where can I go to find such information, and information on how those standards are evolving? This article was written in 1999; where can I find new stuff?

I appreciated the ARMS' chapter which made an overview of the Web and its history, but I have read it many times now, so I don't have that many questions.