Linguistic and architectural requirements for personalized digital libraries

Abstract. Our vision of digital libraries is influenced by our experience with systems for persistent and networked object management and with polymorphic programming languages for their implementation. When viewed from this perspective, the essence of digital libraries can be captured by the following three essentials: (1) the content of a digital library is represented by two kinds of information entities: on the basic level there are informa-tion tokens as supplied by information providers on the net; value is added to such tokens by individually constructing information artifacts over them with the goal of information consumer satisfaction; (2) the services required for artifact construction and use – on the information level as well as on the level of the software artifacts required for these processes – rel