Digital Library Reference Model - In a Nutshell

The Digital Library universe is a complex framework bringing together many disciplines and fields, spanning data management, information retrieval, library sciences, document management, information systems, web image processing, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and digital curation. The Digital Library universe is also an interplay of professional roles, encompassing cataloguing and curating, defining, customising and maintaining the Digital Library and its services, as well as developing and customising software. Such complexity and diversity in terms of approaches, solutions and systems has driven the need for common foundations that foster best practices and help focus further advancement in the field. The Digital Library Reference Model aims at contributing to the creation of such foundations. It is the result of a collective understanding on Digital Libraries that has been acquired by European research groups under the umbrella of the European funded DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, as well as the international scientific community active in the field of Digital Libraries. The outcomes of DELOS have been taken forward by DL.org, a project funded by the Cultural Heritage and Technology Advanced Learning Unit of the Information Society Directorate-General of the European Commission, working in synergy with a team of international experts in the field to enhance and extend the Reference Model. The Digital Library Reference Model is a conceptual framework aimed at capturing significant entities and their relationships in the digital library universe with the goal of developing a concrete model of it. This conceptual framework can be exploited for coordinating approaches, solutions and systems development in the digital library area. In particular, it is envisaged that in the future Digital Library ‘systems’ will be described, classified and measured according to the key elements introduced by this model. Behind the Reference Model’s efforts there has been the driving force of The Digital Library Manifesto, laying down the main notions characterising the Digital Library universe in rather abstract terms