The Digital Library initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illi
nois at Urbana-Champaign is developing the information infrastructure
to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. The authors
are constructing a large test-bed of scientific literature, evaluatin
g its effectiveness under significant use, and researching enhanced se
arch technology. They are building repositories (organized collections
) of indexed multiple-source collections and federating (merging and m
apping) them by searching the material via multiple views of a single
virtual collection. Developing widely usable Web technology is also a
key goal. Improving Web search beyond full-text retrieval will require
using document structure in the short term and document semantics in
the long term. Their testbed efforts concentrate on journal articles f
rom the scientific literature, with structure specified by the Standar
d Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Research efforts extract semanti
cs from documents using the scalable technology of concept spaces base
d on context frequency. They then merge these efforts with traditional
library indexing to provide a single Internet interface to indexes of
multiple repositories.