Challenges of Distributed Search Across Digital Libraries

We present the MINERVA project that tackles the problem of collaborative search across a large number of digital libraries. The search engine is layered on top of a Chord-style peer-to-peer overlay network that connects an a-priori unlimited number of peers or digital libraries. Each library posts a small amount of metadata to a conceptually global, but physically distributed directory. This directory is is used to efficiently select promising libraries to execute a query based on their local data. The paper discusses current challenges regarding replication, caching and proactive dissemination, query routing based on local user profiles such as bookmarks, and benefit/cost models for query routing