An OAI-Compliant Federated Physics Digital Library

Old Dominion University Research Foundation, Norfolk VA

Investigators

Abstract

This project is building an Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compliant federated digital library with an emphasis on physics for the National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL). This physics digital library will federate holdings from the physics e-print server arXiv (http://arXiv.org), Physical Review D from the American Physical Society (http://prd.aps.org), and the collected holdings from the Technical Report Interchange (TRI) project (http://egbert.cs.odu.edu/tri/html/). TRI includes reports from the NASA Langley Research Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Other holdings are being imported from the Arc project (http://arc.cs.odu.edu). To federate collections with varying degrees of richness of metadata elements poses a number of challenging questions, which the investigators are addressing, in the areas of resource discovery, creation and maintenance of harvested metadata, and economic sustainability. Regarding resource discovery: (1) How do we enable users to search across diverse collections within one common interface without losing the ability of searching with richer metadata elements for collections that support them? (2) How do we address the lack of a uniform controlled vocabulary? (3) How do we map the user's view of the domain into the metadata models of the participating archives? Regarding creation and maintenance: (1) What is the most effective way of keeping the metadata between data providers and the federation service consistent almost all the time? Are the current OAI protocols sufficiently developed and robust enough to support the consistency? (2) How do we address the dynamic nature of the collections? The Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in NSF's Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences is providing significant co-funding for this project in recognition of its emphasis on developing collections and services in the area of physics.