Digital Library - Quantitative Social Science Research

Abstract

In this paper, we present an overview of the Virtual Data Center (VDC) software, an open-source digital library system for the management and dissemination of distributed collections of quantitative data. (see ). The VDC functionality provides everything necessary to maintain and disseminate an individual collection of research studies, including facilities for the storage, archiving, cataloging, translation, and on-line analysis of a particular collection. Moreover, the system provides extensive support for distributed and federated collections including: location-independent naming of objects, distributed authentication and access control, federated metadata harvesting, remote repository caching, and distributed 'virtual' collections of remote objects.