The design and implementation of an infrastructure for multimedia digital libraries

We develop an infrastructure for managing, indexing and serving multimedia content in digital libraries. This infras-tructure follows the model of the web, and thereby is dis-tributed in nature. We discuss the design of the Librarian, the component that manages meta data about the content. The management of meta data has been separated from the media servers that manage the content itself. Also, the ex-traction of the meta data is largely independent of the Li-brarian. We introduce our extensible data model and the daemon paradigm that are the core pieces of this architec-ture. We evaluate our initial implementation using a re-lational database. We conclude with a discussion of the lessons we learned in building this system, and proposals for improving the flexibility, reliability, and performance of the system