The Alexandria Digital Library on the World Wide Web

The Alexandria Project is a 4-year $4M effort to develop a digital library for geographically-referenced information. A major goal of the Project is to make the collections and services of existing map libraries such as the Davidson Library's Map and Imagery Laboratory, accessible over public wide-area networks, such as the World Wide Web. These collections, services and associated computing infrastructure comprise the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL).

Geographic referencing is a powerful tool for information search and retrieval, analogous yet orthogonal to the traditional author-title-subject queries serviced by traditional libraries. Every "holding" (discretely addressable digital object) in ADL is associated with one or more "footprints" (portions of the Earth's surface most relevant to the holding's contents). Footprints may be either explicit (the boundary of a map) or implicit (the state of California associated with a California history textbook). The Alexandria Project is actively addressing the cataloging, data entry and graphical interface issues posed by footprints.

The management of digital collections is another area at the boundaries of traditional librarianship. The overall architecture of the ADL supports a highly structured, networked catalog providing pointers to widely distributed stores of digital information. The architecture is flexible enough to support complete digital libraries, or special collections of existing materials defined solely by special catalogs, or minimum-service online repositories accessed via remote catalogs, or any combination of these.

ADL is being developed with the active participation of the library community. We expect that a significant fraction of ADL's initial user community will be librarians seeking digital "leverage" over holdings and services that are currently very difficult for them to support.

This presentation will begin with an overview of the Alexandria Project, followed by a demonstration of the Project's current World Wide Web interface.