System Infrastructure for Digital Libraries: A Survey and Outlook

This paper focuses on technical issues regarding the challenge of integrating digital libraries in a work support environment that combines information management with coordination and collaboration. Such broad scope necessitates an extended view of electronic documents to allow for combinations of information content together with executable components. Moreover, as a result of the autonomy of the service and information content providers, this environment takes the form of an information economy. This paper provides a brief survey of research results related to architectures, metadata, interoperability and rights management in digital library systems. This survey serves to support a discussion of extending the scope of digital library systems toward integrated work support environments.