The Design And Implementation Of A Universal Digital Library Management System-its Storage Management And Services For Digital Resources

The rapid development of information technology makes more and more digital resources stored and managed in digital libraries. Digital resources can be characterized by: (1) various types and formats of the resources; (2) various types and formats of metadata; (3) the distributed feature of the resources; and (4) customized services based on the resources. There are two challenging problems for digital resource management: first, how to store and manage those resources with above mentioned characteristics; and second, how to provide different services based on different resources.This thesis presents the design and implementation for a universal Digital Library Management System (DLMS) aimed to address the two challenging problems. With regard to the first problem, we use Fedora, an open source digital object management system as our underlying resources management subsystem. In this way, we solve the problem of comprehensively storing and managing different resources. With respect to the second problem, we build virtual collection configuring and managing module and search service module, so that we can provide different services based on different resources. DLMS has following features: (1) universality, that is, supporting all kinds of digital resources which are different in resource type and format, format of metadata, network position, and services provided; (2) extensibility, i.e. dynamically supporting new services based on resources of new media type and metadata format, and supporting second-time development; (3) interoperability, that is, information sharing and exchange with other systems via XML file or OAI protocol.The thesis work can be summarized as follows. (1) It analyzes, in depth, digital object architecture and Fedora, and elaborates that Fedora which implements digital object architecture can solve the problem of comprehensively storing and managing different resources. (2) The design and implementation of virtual collection, which enables to offer different services for various resources. (3) The design and implementation of automatic creation and updating modules of indexes. And (4) the design and implementation of search service module, and the customization and automatic generation of search interface.