SCHOOLNET A Digital Library Testbed to Support Networked Scholarly Communities

Scholnet is a digital library system for supporting communication and collaboration among networked scholarly communities. In addition to the provision of standard digital library capabilities for information acquisition, description, archiving, access, search, dissemination, and user handling, this infrastructure provides support for non-textual data types, hypermedia annotation, cross-language search and retrieval, and personalised information dissemination. From the technical point of view, Scholnet consists of an open federation of distributed and replicated service instances that communicate through an established protocol. The federation can always be modified dynamically by adding new service instances without switching off the digital library.