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Building an Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliant federated
digital
library with an emphasis on physics for the National Science,
Mathematics,
Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL). The
NSF
funded project is led by a team at Old Dominion University: Kurt
J. Maly
(PI), Michael L. Nelson, and Mohammad Zubair. Collaborative
partners with
ODU are Rick Luce at Los Alamos and Marc Doyle at the American
Physical
Society.
This physics digital library will federate holdings from the
physics
e-print server arXiv, Physical
Review D
from the American Physical
Society, and
the collected holdings from the Technical
Report Interchange (TRI) project. TRI includes reports from
the NASA
Langley Research Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the
Air Force
Research Laboratory. Other holdings are being imported from the Arc
project. To federate collections with varying degrees of
richness
of metadata elements poses a number of challenging questions,
which the
investigators are addressing, in the areas of resource discovery,
creation
and maintenance of harvested metadata, and economic
sustainability. Regarding
resource discovery:
(1) How do we enable users to search across diverse collections
within
one common interface without losing the ability of searching with
richer
metadata elements for collections that support them? (2) How do we
address
the lack of a uniform controlled vocabulary? (3) How do we map the
user's
view of the domain into the metadata models of the participating
archives?
Regarding creation and maintenance:
(1) What is the most effective way of keeping the metadata between
data
providers and the federation service consistent almost all the time?
Are
the current OAI protocols sufficiently developed and robust enough
to support
the consistency? (2) How do we address the dynamic nature of the
collections?
The Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in NSF's Directorate for
Mathematical
and Physical Sciences is providing significant co-funding for this
project
in recognition of its emphasis on developing collections and
services in
the area of physics.
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