Dienst: an architecture for distributed document libraries

Abstract

Dienst, a digital library architecture is in particular a protocol and implementation that provides Internet access to a distributed, decentralized multi-format document collection managed by a set of interoprating Dienst servers which in turn provide digital library services. A significant feature of Dienst is that indexes are distributed and searchers are processed in parallel across each index site. The current implementation of the architecture provides two types of searching; bibliographic and full-text.