Interlibrary Communication
This research project examines how to access the music data once they
are stored. This problem arises even for new digitally-born materials.
Since we cannot expect thousands of libraries worldwide to agree on the
same database system or query system, the potential for applying the emerging
technology called Web Services, which is designed to exchange information
between different systems, will be investigated. The technology includes:
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language
(WSDL), and Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI).
Based on the XML format, UDDI is used to register each institution’s
services; WSDL is used to describe the type of service, access protocol,
and its location; and SOAP is used as the protocol to exchange information.
The attractiveness of this technology for application in distributed digital
libraries is that it assumes that each system (library) will be different.
Web Services provide users with the “what, where, and how”
to access information from disparate systems. This will be one of the
key principal components in creating distributed digital libraries. This
technology allows libraries to interconnect, rather than relying on one
institution to collect everything (Lagoze and Fielding 1998).
The final result will be easy access for library patrons through a library
portal that is connected to other libraries via the Internet. Patrons
will be able to access content such as score images, searchable score
content, sound and video recordings without being concerned about the
physical location of the digital object (Cruz and James 1999).
Incorporation of Web Services for interlibrary communication has started
with the development of protocols such as Metadata
Encoding & Transmission (METS), Metadata
Object Description Schema (MODS) (Guenther and McCallum 2002), and
Search / Retrieve
Web Service (SRW). With the computer resources of the infrastructure,
further research and software development can be supported to integrate
libraries and especially music libraries seamlessly.
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