An Architecture for a Distributed Digital Library from the Desktop up: The Fascinator

摘要

This poster describes the architecture of a new kind of digital repository service that includes components that run on desktop computers, designed to close the gap between Institutional Repositories (IRs) and the day-to-day electronic work environment used by researchers, and to address the too-often heard cry from repository managers of "we built it but they didn't come". The team at the Australian Digital Futures Institute are working with researchers to provide software that can (a) index and expose the research data content on their hard disks (b) extract metadata from files (c) automatically process data according to highly configurable workflows including producing web-ready renditions of research objects including documents, domain specific data visualizations (such as chemical molecules) and converting video and images so that they may be easily previewed. The architecture is inspired by the success of consumer software in two ways; the way entertainment programs organize content via faceted browse and search interfaces using embedded metadata, and the way photographic software allows content to be grouped into collections and pushed to online services, which are essentially repositories.