Stanford Library Cyberinfrastructure - DLF Fall Forum - Nov 7, 2007

I would really call this more a Service-Oriented Architecture to support advanced digital library activities.  Definitely some interesting work, a good contribution to library SOA.

Defining and Designing a Cyberinfrastructure for the Library of the Future
Tom Cramer, Lynn McRae, Rachel Gollub
Digital Library Systerms & Services
Stanford University

* design pattern & process

Environmental Scan at SULAIR
1. Digital preservation
2. Google Book scanning
3. Internal digitization
4. Discovery
5. Content delivery
6. Ongoing proces re-engineering

[diagram - The Digital Library: Content, Services & Infrastructure]

- content management & content infrastructure

content streams->digital library holdings->services
supported by content management & middleware plus SDR (Stanford Digital Repository)

The Challenge

Analytic Environments, Delivery Apps, Discovery Apps on top of many other components

Strategy 1: Hardware Approach - ILS (nope)
Strategy 2: Repository-centric (nope - SDR is preservation infrastructure)
Strategy 3: MacGyver It (duct tape)
Strategy 4: Library Middleware
- Content Registry
- Collections Registry
- Access Broker
supported by
Reporting, Intelligence, Monitoring
"Content & Service Middleware"

Parallel to Identity Management - in enterprise computing, we have patterns that we use

"identity management for digital content - content registry"

The process

1. Recognize need
2. Think through narratives
3. Idenity parts
- Applications
- Services
- Infrastructure
4. Assemble in an architecture
5. diversion into ESBs
6. Validate concepts & find a name

What's the Need? The Gap to fill?

what it's not
- not an ILS, nor a new catalog, nor a repository, not protocol or standard, not discovery nor delivery apps, not user-facing

what it is
* infrastructure underpinning applications
* design pattern & architecture

Narratives

1. Support for scholarly workflows
2. Personalized academic work environment
3. DIY Library/Research Environment
4. Integrated, comprehensive content discovery
5. Creating, managing, publishing dynamic digital collections
6. Extend library infrastructure & workflows to already digital content
... more

1. Scholarly workflows

Support collaboration, research and publication through a full information and creative lifecycle

[list of use cases]

extract set of capabilities from use cases

2. Personalized Academic Work Environment

Highly personalized services and resources based on persistent and intimate knowledge of the scholar's identity,
roles, background, explicity choices, and implicity preferences

* Endow all services with an awareness of personal identity, preferences and contributions

3. The DIY Library/Research Environment

Enable scholars to use the tools of their choice to incorporate library data, metadata, and complementary services
into their workspace

* APIs to content, metadata, libraryservices

4. Comprehensive content discovery

Ability to discover across all content stores

...

8. Library management, operations, reporting

internal monitoring abilties

Five themes derived from narratives
1. Identity
2. Preservation
3. Personalization
4. Access
5. Management

bound together in a common infrastructure

Services, Infrastructure

Translating function into architecutre

[diagram]

SOA on ESB

Content Management
* data/metadata stores
* data/content sources

Services -- Preservation & Management
Services -- Access/Identity/Peronalization
Infrastructure services

metadata store, "a bunch of XML files", sitting on the ESB
- including plugin service API, management services API

ESB gives you a bunch of functionality, Fedora gives you a bunch of functionality...

"Lyberstructure"