Dienst: an architecture for distributed document libraries

As one of the five universities participating in the ARPA-sponsored Computer Science Technical Report project, we at Cornell have developed a digital library architecture called Dienst. Dienst is a protocol and implementation that provides Internet access to a distributed, decentralized multi-format document collection. The collection is managed by a set of interoperating Dienst servers distributed over the Internet. These servers provide three digital library services: repositories of multi-format documents; indexes into the document collection and search engines for these indexes; and user interfaces for browsing, searching, and accessing the collection.