DL.org Project Periodic Report

Global Digital Library infrastructures resulting from the federation and interoperation of regional, national and international Digital Library (DL) Systems and Digital Repositories are expected to significantly advance cross-domain research through universal access to a broad spectrum of resources. Their realization requires additional progresses towards approaches and techniques for achieving interoperability among these systems. DL interoperability is a multi-perspective notion that encompasses technological, legal and policy aspects and is very hard to achieve. Many ongoing DL projects are attempting to address it. Most of them, however, act in isolation and adopt ad-hoc solutions and methodologies. This results in duplicated efforts, slow progress in enhancing the quality of the developed system, and little or no interoperability with other DLs. There is an evident lack of shared understanding of concepts in the sector, which hinders communication between different projects. Furthermore, there are only very sporadic and un-coordinated opportunities for these projects to meet, present their requirements and proposed solutions, collaborate, and build a consensus on a set of best practices and standards. The lack of co-ordinated outreach activities makes it extremely difficult for a project to advance the state of the art in a way that is immediately exploitable by all DLs. As a result, the wider uptake of results generated by DL research becomes infeasible and the creation of European Information Space stagnates