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• R. Vincent P. Babilonia
• Immanuel M. Navarro

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Digital libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities [7]. Technologies and standards in this field of interest are actively being developed as more organizations and communities outside of the academe become aware of their need for an organized information repository system that can go beyond the limitations of traditional libraries in terms of the type and amount of content provided, the speed and reliability of the services offered, and the range of clientele, or users, that it can accomodate. The thesis proposal herein contains the design of a digital library that is flexible, secure, reliable and whose encoding of the content metadata adheres to a set of widely-accepted standards. A summary survey of some of the existing digital libraries that are currently under development, as well as those which have already been released in commercial markets, will also be presented as an aid - by drawing a comparison to the proposed digital library system to analyzing the various concerns and issues in implementing the system. This will also serve as a guide to understanding the decisions that were made in the design of the digital library system.

The digital library system herein proposed will be implemented with the capability to store multimedia content including, but not limited to, audio and video data. The proposed digital library system will thus be designed to utilize Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6 or IPng) services if these services are present and available in the connection between the client and the server. The advantages of IPv6 over its predecessor, IPv4, are numerous and as part of the research process, studies and experiments will be made to test whether or not an IPv6 connection significantly increases reliability, security and transmission speed of data throughout the digital library system. In particular, IPv6 claims to provide increased connection security and Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities, which decreases network congestion and packet delay from source to destination by prioritizing packets that are being sent across time-critical connections.

This section foremostly presents the historical and social significance of libraries in our society. A short discussion on the transition from traditional libraries to digital libraries will be drawn to illustrate the advantages, and thus the need, to migrate to a digital library system. Several key issues concerning the traditional library system will then be enumerated as this provides a stepping stone to the discussion of the options present to the developer of the system, that must be considered when designing a digital library. In relation to the said key issues, some existing digital library systems will also be examined and compared to each other as the design decisions present in these existing systems provide a basis for comparison in designing the proposed digital library system.

The next generation Internet Protocol (IPv6) will also be discussed so as to highlight the features and advantages it offers over its predecessor (IPv4) that could be utilized by the proposed Digital Library System.

The word library is generally accepted and used loosely to refer to a collection of information. Most people are familiar with the concept of a traditional library system and when the term digital library is encountered, most would be able to arrive at a consensus on what a digital library system is as a conceptual and/or functional entity based on their knowledge of the library as they know it in its traditional form, . However, most attempts to provide a technical definition that accurately and correctly embodies the workings of a digital library system is prone to be in error. This is primarily due to the fact that no universally accepted single or set of standards exist which outline, in detail, the scope, function, presentation, manner of storage, organization, and so on and so forth - of a digital library system.

A library, in its most traditional sense, is made up of information sources printed or written on paper, preserved, cataloged, and made accessible to a defined set of clientele [2].

The origin of libraries goes very far back in human history. The earliest testimonies to their existence can be traced to around 3000 BC. According to the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, a temple in the Babylonian town of Nippur, dating from the first half of the 3rd millennium BC, was found to have a number of rooms filled with clay tablets, suggesting a well-stocked archive or library. Interestingly enough, in the ancient times, there was little distinction between an archive, where records were kept, and a library. This, in some sense, implies that libraries had existed for almost as long as records were kept.

Furthermore, the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us that the English word library has a long history, occurring in a prose translation in 1374. The Latin word liber means "book", while the French librairie denotes a bookshop or a publisher. In many countries the word signifies a collection of books, public or private, and is derived from a Latinized Greek word, bibliotheca, hence giving rise to bibliotheque in French, biblioteca in Italian and Spanish, Bibliothek in German, and biblioteka in Russian. In Japanese the word toshokan, which means "building of books" is used. Thus, the use of the word library to denote a building, room, or set of rooms in which a collection of books is contained goes back to the 15th century [3]. The gist of the concept of what a library is cannot only then be inferred contextually from everyday use, but also from the origin of the term library itself as present in its form and usage across cultures and down through history.

Libraries in the ancient world were often found in the proximity of kings or priests. They were the first to collect and preserve documents produced by their own activities. Religious libraries have existed in all eras of humanity's cultural history. In many cases they led to the conservation of other types of documents [1].

The first libraries in the eastern world started to appear in China, then the most powerful empire in its part of the world, around the time of Confucius (late 6th century BC). Some researches have even claimed that libraries existed at a much earlier era - the Shang Dynasty (1554-1045 BC). However, before the 20th century, most of these libraries were either imperial libraries, in academies, or private collections. The primary purpose of these libraries where that of collection and preservation rather than of access and use. The development of the modern libraries in China did not start until the beginning of the 20th Century [4].

In the western world, the idea of collecting books, and therefore the creation of libraries, were passed down from the classical world. Most of the larger Greek temples possessed religious libraries. In the 4th century BC, the great schools of philosophy gained reknown in Athens and with it was built the first institutional libraries, the most famous of which belonged to the Peripatetic school which was founded and systematically organized by Aristotle to facilitate scientific research. Aristotle's library formed the basis of the library established at Alexandria, which became the greatest in antiquity.

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, books were found to be essential to the spiritual life. The rule laid down for observance by several monastic orders enjoined the use of books; that of the Benedictine Order, especially, recognized the importance of reading and studying.

Gutenberg's invention of the movable type for printing and an expansion of lay literacy widened the circle of book collectors, which then were comprised only of royalty and the wealthy people due to the cost of books, to include wealthy merchants whose libraries contained books of law and medicine, herbals, and devotional books. Book collection continued to gain widespread practice and several private collections which were then assembled eventually became the core of present day national and state libraries.

In the middle of the 19th century, the idea had been accepted that community libraries might be provided by local authorities at public expense. Great libraries would be available to poor students so that they could indulge their "learned curiosity". In England in 1850 an act of Parliament was passed enabling local councils to levy a rate for the provision of free library facilities. From the first tentative beginnings there has been continuous growth in the providing of reading and other services and in the use that is made of them by the public.

While both general and religious libraries have a long history, the more concerted effort to organize library-activities is far more recent. It was not until the end of nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth that common forms of library-organisations arose in Europe and the United States of America, either on a national as international level. Henri La Fontaine and Paul Otlet were the first to organize the international cooperation of libraries and librarians. In 1885 they founded the Institut International de Bibliographie that, in 1938, took the name by which it is still known, Federation Internationale de Documentation (FID). Another, more typical, initiative to establish an internationally recognised association of libraries resulted in the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), founded in 1927 under the auspices of UNESCO at Edinburgh. It encompassed associations and institutes (such as libraries and library-formation institutions) as well as personal associates.

The introduction of computers in modern day society has created a profound impact on the internal processes of the traditional library system. Public libraries, especially those in the more developed countries, have a long history in library automation, covering 25 years or so, and very few have not automated their issue catalogue and acquisition. However, in that 25 years very little has changed in the type of system the public libraries are using [5]. Furthermore, with the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web, as well as the emergence of database technologies that could store and retrieve data very efficiently, information specialists saw an opportunity to migrate traditional library systems onto virtual platforms. This has thus created a menagerie of different library systems which is consituted by a hybrid or mixture of traditional and digital elements compounded in various manners and proportions. On one end of the "traditional vs. digital" spectrum lies the purely traditional library system which exists within a particular geographic location and which relies on the time-tested Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress system to catalogue and index their non-digital collections. On the other hand, the opposing end of the spectrum includes libraries which exist purely in the virtual world, whose services are offered through a network or the Internet, and whose users may be far removed from the actual location where the content is stored.

A significant part of the difficulty in defining a digital library in exact terms stems from the fact that the phrase digital library is applied to a myriad of library systems, each of which have different configurations of real and virtual elements. To provide an organized basis for comparison between the purely traditional library, the purely digital library and all variants in between, there is a need to examine the core aspects of a library system. Three elements have been identified as universal and integral to all library systems.

Content

Content refers to the actual information, concrete or virtual, contained within the collection. Traditional libraries often limit their content to a specific range of topics or subject areas due to the bulk of information resources available to them. By limiting the type and amount of content they provide, they could organize and retrieve information resources pertinent to their clients more effectively. Due to this, libraries are built specifically to address the needs of a particular type of users, which is evident in the difference of the content being provided between, for example, a children's library and a college library.

A lot of libraries today complement their collection of books, magazines, articles, technical papers, monograms, etc. with digital information resources like CD-ROMs and online databases/archives. It is also becoming a common practice in libraries to digitize, or transfer content from concrete media to digital media by manual encoding, scanning, or some other process. It is also not uncommon for an information resource to be present in the collection both as a virtual and a concrete entity. Finally, information resources present in the collection may contain both virtual and concrete parts.

The manner by which libraries deal with digital information resources can be categorized into four cases. This classification is a generalization based on observation and is made solely to aid in the discussion of the different roles that digital content is treated in library systems. The first case is trivial - that wherein the library does not contain, and has no plans of acquiring any digital information resource. The second case, wherein the library contains only digital information resources in its collection, is also trivial. The manner by which digital information is handled depends solely either on the existing architecture or organization of the system, or on the discretion of the designer/developer as the system is being built. The third and fourth case presents the situation wherein a library contains both concrete and digital information resources at the same time. Although the second case is the only case relevant to the proposed digital system, the other cases are presented for completeness.

Most libraries which contain both concrete and digital information resources fall under the third case, that which treats digital content merely as an extension to their existing collection. No special provisions for digital content are made except, perhaps, for the classification of the information resource as "digital" or "online". In essence, digital information resources in this case are treated as just another information resource in the collection, on the same level with concrete information resources like books and analog tapes and others. From the perspective of libraries under this case, the only difference between digital content and concrete content is the media in which it resides in.

The fourth case is exemplified by library systems that treat digital information resources as a totally separate entity from their collection of concrete information resources. These libraries create a separate (in the context of search and access) and most often independent system for acquiring, organizing, and retrieving data from the digital information resources contained therein. The advantage of this method of treating digital content lies on the fact that a system which assumes that it can only contain digital content can use this assumption to utilize the myriad advantages of a purely digital library system over traditional ones.

Digitizing content presents many advantages not found in concrete content. The following enumeration presents some positive effects when information resources are placed in a digital medium:

• digital information resources can be copied quickly in large amounts without loss of quality and without degrading or compromising the integrity of the information resource
• digital information resources are always available regardless of the number of users using the information resource
• digital information resources can be used and reused without fear that the document will be worn out
• digital information resources are immune from physical factors like the environment or the abuse of users
• digital information resources, due to its nature, can be organized and retrieved at a significantly lower amount of time compared to its concrete counterparts

Services

A library, regardless of the amount or quality of its contents, will never be useful without a sufficient service system. Services is term that refers to the set of transactions that take place in the library system. This may include content related processes like acquisition, indexing and tracking whether a certain information resource is available for use or not. Services may also include client related transactions like managing the list (or database) of registered clients, the borrowing of information resources, the paying of fines and other penalties and so on and so forth. In essence, the services of a digital library system should link the content and the client in such a way that the client can access and retrieve the information he or she needs as quickly and efficiently as possible.

There are so many processes and transactions that fall under the service element of a library system and as such, there are equally just as many possibilities and configurations for converting these systems into digital systems. A lot of modern libraries complement their traditional card catalogues with an online catalogue that enables their users to search for an information resource. The output of these online catalogue systems are usually either the call number or the accession number of the information resource.

In this respect, most of the transactions that used to be handled by librarians and library staff are gradually becoming automated and only recently have libraries and librarians begun to recognize their changing roles in a society that have changed its manner and perspective in the acquisition of information. Some has even gone as far as to opine that with the Internet, the largest collection of digital information resource, at the fingertips of just about anyone who has a personal computer, a modem and a connection, the need for librarians have ceased. As such, librarians have to redefine their tasks. The central role of the librarian now is to be the person able to provide knowledge about information and be an important link in the information flow whether the source be concrete or digital [2].

The succeeding enumeration presents some of the advantages of automating and converting library services into a digital system:

• a library with a digital repository can store more forms of media than traditional libraries, including information resources and works that are not available in concrete form
• libraries with online services are not constrained by human limitations (such as working hours) and consequently, are available for as long as the network in which the system resides in is available
• the bulk of the reliability of the services depends solely on the design of the system whereas in the traditional library, the reliability of a particular service depended on whether the person/s involved in the service is reliable or not
• the efficiency and speed by which information can be retrieved from libraries with online services is not reliant on human factors but solely on the current state of the network and on the design of the system
• an online service enables people to focus more on their work and less in the process of the acquisition of data

Clientele

The clientele refers to the set or community of users that could access the information resource stored within the library. In the transition from traditional to digital, the foremost revolution in this respect is the delocalization of clients. Traditional libraries resided in a physical building (or a room) in a definite geographical location. People had to go to these locations just to be able to use the services of the library.

Networking technology and the Internet has made it possible for clients to access information from the library system no matter where they are as long as they have an internet connection. This has greatly changed the way libraries operate as more and more people are accessing information resources from remote destinations. The delocalization of clients creates more opportunities for learning for people who do not have a library in their geographical area but who have access to a network containing a digital library or to the Internet. In addition to this, being able to access information from remote areas is very convenient. By enabling clients to access information inside a library from remote places, the library in effect can go to people instead of the other way around.

The role of digital libraries do not differ significantly from that of the traditional libraries, though there are great changes in the system in the transition from the traditional to the digital paradigm. The most apparent and most technical function of libraries is to identify, acquire, preserve and provide access to the world's published knowledge [6]. This is the primary reason why libraries maintain vast archives of information, from the most trivial to the most vital, in the knowledge that in some future date, a particular piece of publication can be used. Digital libraries extend this role to include items that have not necessarily been published in the traditional sense. These include information resources that do not exist in a physical form such as digital works (pictures, graphics and documents in variant formats) and streaming media.

Libraries should also promote equality of access to information. There should not exist any form of prejudice in determining which people can access which information. In this manner, libraries also strive to promote intellectual freedom, and support education and continuous learning and research. Libraries provide a venue where people can synthesize the knowledge and intellectual output of others in forming a solution to a particular problem [6]. Digital libraries enable more people, due to the delocalization of their clients, to retrieve and use information that would not have been available to them, further promoting intellectual freedom and equal access to information. The availability of digital libraries, especially those found on the Internet, has the most impact on underdeveloped and marginalized communities where there is no traditional library that would provide a cornerstone for education and research.

Finally, libraries support the development of information literacy in society. Information literacy enables people to develop solutions to real-world problems and consequently make technological advancements that advance or improve the standards of living in a society. Libraries also serve as focal points for communities, for sharing of information between people, and for promoting community interests [6]. Due to the expansion of its client base and the streamlined computerized services, digital libraries can accomodate more people into the community that it serves and information literacy is more widely propagated.

The development of a digital library that properly fulfills its functions, not only in the technical sense as the conformation to the specifications of the system, but also to its social functions, there is a need to carefully examine the different issues that come into play when designing digital library systems.

Information Control refers to the range and type of users that have the authority to acquire, modify or remove a certain information resource from the collection. In the traditional library setting, only librarians and library staff were given these priveleges. A digital library system could be designed in such a way that there is no need for the equivalent of a librarian or a library staff and thus, these tasks are passed down to different people who does not necessarily have the training or experience in librarianship or library science. In this regard, the design and implementation of the system should not only incorporate authentication and verification mechanisms to assure the currency, accuracy and integrity of data, but also present these select group of users with an interface of the system that is logical and easy to use.

Information control greatly affects three elements with regards to the quality of the information resource contained within. The first is the currency of the information resource. Currency denotes whether or not the content present in the library is the latest and most up to date. A research library with unupdated contents will only mislead and frustrate its clients and as such, the system should be designed in such a way that some people are given the task to acquire and update information. The accuracy, or the correctness of data within the information resource, and the integrity, or the completeness of information, is also compromised when a digital library system is designed without information control. Information resources which have been verified as correct and complete should not be allowed to be tampered with just by anyone. Due to the volatile properties of the digital medium, strict rules must be layed out to prevent the accidental or the intentional addition, modification or deletion of information resources that would compromise either the accuracy or the integrity of the information collection.

Fluidity refers to the handling of multiple versions of the information resource, and to the maintenance of the authenticity and correctness of data from version to version. In reality, it is not uncommon for the author of a particular document or item to update his or her work by releasing a new volume or a new version. The digital library system must be able to track changes that have occurred in the contents of an information resource and the acquisition of the new versions must be designed such that, first of all, there are provisions for the author or the owner of an information resource to update the content within the information resource and secondarily, there would exist a series of aunthetication and verification processes similar to that of the issue of information control in assuring the system that the updated version does indeed come from the author or owner of the information resource.

Preservation refers to the lifetime of an information resource. It deals with the length of time a particular content resides within the collection. Although library systems strive as much as possible to preserve every item in its collection, some factors like storage space or financial constraints force the system to discard certain information resources in lieu of more important or critical information resources. In the digital library system, the issue of preservation begs of the designer of the system the criteria by which the lifetime of an information resource is determined and the group of people or users who are given the authority to decide whether or not an information resource should be discarded.

Authorship refers to the person, group of persons, organization, community or institution that created or compiled an information resource. Authorship should be visible in the digital library system (i.e. every information resource should be presented with an author as much as possible) so that users can use this as a criteria to judge the correctness and importance of a particular information resource to them.

Ownership refers to the owner of an information resource. There are many cases wherein the author and the owner of an information resource are two different entities. The recognition of the owner in a digital library system is very important because this issue not only deals with the library system itself but at the same time bears the potential to incur problems from the legal arena due to prevalent Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) laws under which the digital library system is subject to. Thus, there should be a way by which owners of information resources could set and enforce restrictions and limitations on the usage and the manner of usage of their data.

Organization and Searchability are two issues that are closely tied together since the way information is organized, both physically and logically, determines to a large extent the efficiency of accessing (searchability) the information resource. Organization deals with designing an efficient method of organizing data into coherent and meaningful categories. The structure will play a large impact on how users will view and access information resource.

There are many available schemes by which a designer or a developer can organize information in the collection, the problem lies in choosing which one is the best for the system. As an example, relatively small collections that have a very limited clientele could simply implement an ordered list of all their information assets based on subject, title or author. In this case, this method of organization is favorable because it is cheap and very easy to maintain. However, for libraries which expect a very large client base and which contain a large collection of information resources, this method of organization fails and some other solution must be implemented (i.e. using a database system or some other hierarchical organization).

Security is closely tied to information control as it describes the mechanism by which information control can be implemented. The designer of the digital library system must provide a way for all transactions and processes that could compromise the reliability of the content or the services of the library to be secure.

There are already many existing digital libraries on the internet but a significant number of these are affiliated with a traditional library. We choose three digital libraries which can be accessed purely from the internet as our proposed digital library will be.

Greenstone Digital Library (GSDL) (www.greenstone.org) was created at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. It implements its user interface and services using CGI and PERL scripts while its server-side programs were made using C++. GSDL uses GDBM as its DBMS. So far, Greenstone only supports Microsoft documents and it cannot easily store image, music and video files unless a modification in its configurations and plug-ins are made. No capability exists for GSDL users to upload files on their own as this privelege is given only to the administrator of the system. GSDL performs a full-text search on its information resources when query from a user is encountered. GSDL runs on top of an Apache web server.

Ganesha Digital Library (GDL) (digilib.itb.ac.id) was created solely by Ishmael Fahmiof Indonesia. Its front-end and back-end programs are implemented using PHP with MySQL as its DBMS. Ganesha readily accepts file formats and at the same time, it allows users to upload their own files onto the system. GDL uses metadata gathered during the building of its collection when it searches for files. It is therfore dependent on a system of XML files that hold the metadata information for the collection. Like the GDSL, Ganesha runs on an Apache web server.

DSpace Federation Project (DSpace) (www.dspace.org) is under development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It is primarily a java application and it uses servlets as a means of interfacing with its users. It also requires a UNIX-type server for it to run on. DSpace uses PostgreSQL to store its information resources. DSpace accepts any type of digital content and each instution the implements DSpace could determine its own list of supported formats and content types, based on its needs and resources. DSpace information resource submission process allows for the description of each item using a qualified version of the Dublin Core metadata schema. These descriptions are entered into a relational database (PostgreSQL), which is used by the search engine to retrieve items. DSpace also runs on Apache.

The Internet Protocol (IP) is the standard that defines the manner in which the network layers of two hosts interact. These hosts may be on the same network or reside on physically distinct heterogeneous networks. In fact, IP was designed from the very beginning with inter-networking in mind.

IP provides a connectionless, unreliable, best-effort packet delivery service. Its service is called connectionless because it resembles the Postal Service or Western Union more than it does the telephone system. IP packets, like telegrams or mail messages, are treated independently. Each packet is stamped with the addresses of the receiver and the sender. Routing decisions are made on a packet-by-packet basis. IP is quite different from connection-oriented and circuit switched phone systems that explicitly establish a connection between two users before any conversation (data exchange) takes place and maintain a connection for the entire length of exchange. A best-effort delivery service means that packets might be discarded during transmission, but not without a good reason. Erratic packet delivery is normally caused by the exhaustion of resources or a failure at the data link or physical layer. In a highly reliable physical system such as an Ethernet LAN, the best-effort approach of IP is sufficient for transmission of large volumes of information. In the geographically distributed and highly diverse Internet, which is subject to many vagaries of operation, IP delivery is insufficient and needs to be augmented by a higher-level protocol to provide satisfactory performance. Ensuring reliability is the responsibility of the higher-layer protocols, such as TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) [8].

IP works by way of assigning every host an IP address. TCP uses these IP addresses to establish a connection between two hosts. However, due to the exponential rate at which the Internet grows, experts have predicted that somewhere between 2005 and 2011, IP addresses will run out. This is the problem being addressed by the latest version of the internet protocol - IPv6. IPv6 increases IP address space to 128 bits, thus increasing the pool of addresses from IPv4's 232 to 2128, or 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 a high number commonly referred to as "plenty" [9]. By desiging our digital library for usage with IPv6, the system will be able to cope with future changes in the architecture of the Internet.

One of the more relevant services of IPv6, in relation to digital libraries, is its support for Quality of Service (QoS). QoS enables senders to request, and devices to apply special handling to different kinds of network traffic. QoS infomration will help routers process packets more quickly. For example, packets travelling through real-time connection as in the case of streaming media will get a higher priority than simple file transfers. This is important for digital libraries that aim to store and provide streaming media as an information resource to their users.

Digital libraries come in many variants and many have tried to provide a solution to the growing need for an organized way to store and retrieve digital information. This research aims to investigate the different options present to a developer when designing a digital library that can store and provide a way to display multimedia content as well as render basic library and client services. By utilizing IPv6 services, if these services are available in the system, the transfer of multimedia content from the system to the client can be enhanced as compared to other digital libraries which do not recognize the existence of the said IPv6 services.

We used a modularized approach to the design of the different aspects of our digital library so that we could isolate the myriad issues confronting every aspect from each other. Each module will be discussed in detail but the following is a quick overview of the interconnection between the modules.

The application module contains most of the logic of the system. It takes care of the administrative processes like registration, data acquisition and so on. The application module uses the interface module to send and receive data from the user. The interface module consequently acts as the front-end of the system. The network module on the other hand communicates with the IP layer and determines if IPv6 services are enabled and available. It is responsible for ensuring the correct and secure transmission of data through the connection. Wrapped inside the interface module is the plug-in module which acts as an interface and also as a layer of abstraction between the network module and the plug-ins classes. Plug-ins enable the interface module to correctly play and display file types of various formats. Finally, the database module is responsible for handling queries sent to the database and for returning the results back to the application module.

This module handles most of the operations relevant to digital library functions. This refers to the how the receptionist (or the interface module) interacts with the collector and the collector with the database. Since we are using IPv6, new generation programs will be used to implement these protocols. Java 2 SDK 1.4.1 already has IPv6 classes. Earlier versions can support IPv6 by downloading Jipsy from sourceforge.net.

Data in the digital library is organized by category and sub-categories. This type of organization will allow users to browse the documents they need more efficiently.

Upon registration, users can specify the groups which they want to belong to. Once group moderators approve the application of the user, the user can view the files which fall under all categories which can be accessed by the group. Registered users can upload files to his or her personal collection/s. Upon uploading a file, the user specifies the category/ies to which the file falls under. The user can also modify and delete files which he or she has previously added. Modification of files include updating file attributes such as metadata information and categories where the file belongs to.

The search function will produce results based on the metadata information attached to a file. If no search parameter is specified, the search function will process all files across all categories. Otherwise, the user can specify search parameters such as by category, author, filename and others.

This module pertains to the user interface of our software. We have agreed that a web-based application is more convenient to use since it is platformindependent. Any operating system (Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac, Solaris, etc.) on any network (ipv4 or ipv6), as long as it has a web browser (Mozilla, IE, Netscape Navigator, etc.) can access the library. There are a number of languages which we can use to implement the interface but we are limited only to languages that run on Linux. Our project will be running on Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Netscape Navigator. It is therefore a series of web pages, preferably Java server pages designed using existing open source editors, to be able to use the functions on our Java programs.

We would be using Java Server Pages (.jsp) for the userware. This would enable us to access the functions in the application module. JSP is a modified HTML document so it will still allow us to make our web pages visually enticing with the use of fancy buttons and background images. There will be hints to inform the user what every button or link would do. In other words, the pages would be user-friendly.

This module contains the interface to all the plug-ins needed to handle different file formats. As an example, multimedia files will be played using a multimedia player created using Java Media Framework 2.1.1 and documents using existing open source office applications.

Greenstone and Ganesha currently support some audio files, proprietary document files (MS Word, MS Excel and MS Powerpoint), some image files, compressed file (.zip) and some video files. We would ensure that our digital library can support all other file formats not mentioned above such as source codes. We will be using plug-ins which follows the interface specified by the plug-in module to allow extensibility of the software in handling a number of file types. Generalized plug-ins can be used by other developers to support additional file formats that can be incorporated into the digital library system.

This module handles the interoperability and intercompatibility issues of the software with regard to the internet protocol layer where it resides.

Our project was designed for use on an IPv6 network but it should be noted that most networks are still running on IPv4 thus, our digital library should be backward-compatible. Using Java 2 SDK 1.4.2, we can implement IPv6 addresses and connections. This would allow us to utilize its features such as scalability, speed and security.

This module is responsible for all database processes with respect to user actions. This refers to the application programs that respond to file uploads, collection building, collection display, collection modification, metadata creation, searching, and others. There will also be a database for all registered users and collection builders. We are planning to use PostgreSQL to handle the different operations involved because of its reliability and security features.

Our primary concerns in this module consist of speed and reliability although we expect that PostgreSQL can handle our needs. The database module will handle data organization at the physical level (storage and retrieval) level.

The research started by investigating the different web, database and network technologies that would be relevant to the creation of a digital library system. Due to the limited resources, JSP and Java was chosen because it is free, reliable and enjoys wide use throughout the computing community. PostgreSQL was also chosen as the database management system of the proposed digital library because of it is free and it contains support for the storage and retrieval of large binary objects.

The design of the system followed, thus the creation and the delineation of the tasks of every module and their interconnection with each other. Almost simulatenously, the design of the table structure of the database was done. Tables were then normalized.

Using the web interface of the Ganesha Digital Library as a basis, the web interface of the proposed digital library system was created. The testing environment was also set up which included activities such as setting up and configuring the web servers, the jsp servers and the database connections. Basic library services such as registration, logging in and collection management were implemented.

Further activities in the future would include the implementation of the plug-in module and the plug-ins as well as refining the server side logic of the system. Compliance with the Dublin Core metadata scheme would also be implemented. Finally the system will be tested under different network topologies involving both IPv6 and IPv4 connections.

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