Alerting in a Digital Library Environment - Do Channels Meet the Requirements?

The classical paradigm of finding information in the WWW by initiating retrieval and browsing becomes more and more ineffective. Other techniques in the context of digital libraries have to be considered. Automatic delivery of contents to the user according to her needs and filtered by her profile of interests is required. Current implementations of such alerting services at content providers side have several drawbacks, e.g. users interest cannot be defined appropriately. In this paper we present an architecture for an alerting service within a general framework of events. Two competing technologies, Netscape's Netcaster and Active Channels by Microsoft, have been proposed for implementing alerting services. Both technologies will be evaluated according to the requirements of a digital library alerting service. Keywords: digital libraries, push technology, alerting, channel, CDF, Netcaster 1 Introduction Imagine one morning you just arrive at your office and switch on your computer..