NCSTRL: Design and deployment of a globally distributed digital library

The World Wide Web provides unprecedented access to globally distributed co ntent. The extent and uniform accessibility of the Web has proven beneficia l for research, education, commerce, entertainment, and numerous other uses . Ironically, the fact that the Web is an information space without boundar ies has also proven its biggest flaw. Key aspects of libraries, such as sel ectivity of content, customization of tools and services relative to collec tion and patron characteristics, and management of content and services are noticeably absent, Over the past four years, we researched the technology and deployment of a digital library architecture that makes it possible to create managed infor mation spaces, digital libraries, within the World Wide Web. Our work has t aken place in the context of NCSTRL,(1) a digital library of computer scien ce research reports. The technical foundation of NCSTRL is Dienst, a protoc ol and architecture for distributed digital libraries that we developed as part of the DARPA-funded Computer Science Technical Reports Project. At the time of the writing of this paper, the NCSTRL collection consisted of pape rs from more than 100 research institutions residing in servers distributed across the United States, Europe, and Asia. In addition, the Dienst protoc ol and implementation has been successfully adopted by a number of other di stributed collections, In this paper, we review our experiences with NCSTRL and Dienst, describe s ome of the lessons we have learned from the deployment experience, and defi ne some directions for the future.