Interoperable Heterogeneous Digital Libraries

We consider interoperability to be one of the most challenging problems currently facing digital libraries. There are two impediments to the goal of interoperable digital libraries: technical issues and social issues. From a technical perspective, it is clearly feasible to design one ideal, open architecture together with a reference implementation. Were everybody to adapt this digital library they should be able to interoperate. This is highly unlikely to happen with the investment various communities have made in their current digital libraries. Secondly, the social inertia to not change the modus operandi for publishing and managing information is enormous. The biggest benefit we see in an interoperable federation is to the general user who can issue queries to the federation. Hence, the technical problem is to reduce the cost to the individual library of joining the federation to a level that the social inertia of making the effort is overcome. If we solve this problem, then the se..