The Alexandria Project is "a consortium of researchers, developers, and educators, spanning the academic, public, and private sectors, exploring a variety of problems related to a distributed digital library for geographically-referenced information. The centerpiece of the Alexandria Project is the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL), an online information system inspired by the Map and Imagery Laboratory (MIL) in the Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The ADL currently provides access over the World Wide Web to a subset of the MIL's holdings, as well as other geographic datasets. The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) Catalog provides metadata for geospatial data (maps, aerial photographs, etc., whether in digital or in hardcopy form), and---as a primary method to that end---ingests existing metadata sets whenever possible. The Geodex sheet-level records for topographic map series (approximately 322,000 records) form a major component of the collection. Coverage is worldwide but primarily concentrated in the Southern California area."
"Since 1994, the Alexandria Digital Library project has developed three prototype digital libraries for georeferenced information. This paper describes the most recent of these efforts, a three-tier client-server architecture that relies heavily on a middleware layer to present a single uniform set of interfaces to multiple heterogeneous servers. These standard interfaces, all of which are implemented in HTTP, support session management, collection discovery and evaluation, metadata searching, metadata retrieval and online holding retrieval. An XML-based metadata encoding scheme and a simple Boolean query language have also been developed. The architecture described by these interfaces has been implemented at the University of California, Santa Barbara." [abstract for the article, cited below.
References:
XML document type definition for the ADL collection metadata - By gjanee@alexandria.ucsb.edu [local archive copy]
XML document type definition for ADL full reports, [local archive copy]
XML document type definition for ADL browse reports, [local archive copy]
"The Alexandria Digital Library architecture." By James Frew, Michael Freeston, Nathan Freitas, Linda Hill, Greg Janee, Kevin Lovette, Robert Nideffer, Terence Smith, Qi Zheng [University of California, Santa Barbara]. Pages 61-73 (with 15 references) in Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. Proceedings of the Second European Conference, ECDL'98. Knossos Royal Village, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, September 21-23, 1998. Edited by Christos Nikolaou and Constantine Stephanidis. Lecture Notes on Computer Science, 1513. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1998. ISBN: 3-540-65101-2.
ADL Gazetteer Content Standard [version of 7/21/98]
Address:
The Alexandria Digital Library
University of California, Santa Barbara
1205 Girvetz Hall
Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA
TEL: 805.893.7665
FAX: 805.893.3045
URL: www.alexandria.ucsb.edu
