Towards a theory of cost management for digital libraries and electronic commerce

One of the features that distinguishes digital libraries from traditional d atabases is new cost models for client access to intellectual property. Cli ents will pay for accessing data items in digital libraries, and we believe that optimizing these costs will be as important as optimizing performance in traditional databases. In this article we discuss cost models and proto cols for accessing digital libraries, with the objective of determining the minimum cost protocol for each model. We expect that in the future informa tion appliances will come equipped with a cost optimizer, in the same way t hat computers today come with a built-in operating system. This article mak es the initial steps towards a theory and practice of intellectual property cost management.