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Development of an Operational Library

Two efforts are underway to bring ADL to operational status. The first, an intercampus inter-institutional effort and the second a local UCSB program. On June 21, 1996 a meeting was held at UCSB to establish an intra-campus-working group for extending the Alexandria testbed to the UC/Stanford community as a whole. Those attending were from campuses at UCB, UCD, UCLA, UCSD, UCI, UCSFO, Stanford and UCSB. They ranged from associate university librarians to government document/map librarians. Each participant represented a collection of spatial data objects (text to multimedia maps to digital images). The ADL team felt confident enough in the testbed to expose the ADL system to invited representatives from the U.C. library community. The intent was to begin the process of extending ADL to the U.C. academic community. For ADL to be a successful service, it was felt that planning for an operational system must include experiences and expertise from other archives, disciplines, and business-related environments. The group concluded that Alexandria was ready to:

The consensus of this group was to actively move forward and as a first step, prepare a draft document that would evolve into a white paper for implementing ADL as a service component of the University of California library system, and perhaps later, the State of California. The mission statement was:
Capitalizing on ADL research, build an UC-Wide operational infrastructure for searching and accessing spatially indexed data. The system will support data discovery, data management, user services and Internet delivery. The following bullets outline the sections of the document as agreed upon by the working group. Each component was to have a series of diagrams (flow/models) and high-level descriptive text, followed by individual campus examples of data to contribute to the digital library. The ADL generalized operational model was to outlined a software implementation that could be implemented at a local U.C. library archive of spatially indexed materials connected to a high-speed intercampus network. ADL would provide the research environment necessary for keeping current the interface, database, data formatting, data management, visualization and storage technologies and assist in establishing an operational environment.

The ADL catalog would be editable by each archive allowing for new entries to be added to the data store. All bibliographic records were to comply with the MARC and FGDC metadata standards. The catalog and data storage components may be centralized, distributed, or mirrored, depending on available technologies. Each campus archive would access data via the ADL interface that searches the metadata database via the Internet. Each bibliographic/object record will point to digital data/library holdings located at storage sites through the U.C. system. The following sections will attempt to convey how data might move through the various system, components, outline the role of standards, hardware and software specifications, implementation timeframe, client/server applications, and personnel models.





next up previous contents
Next: How data might Up: CURRENT STATUS OF Previous: Systems Engineering Team



Terence R. Smith
Tue Jul 21 09:26:42 PDT 1998