CENDI Interest Area — Digital/Virtual Libraries
CENDI's interest in Digital Libraries, particularly in repositiories of government information, culminated in the development of science.gov. However, prior to this development, CENDI had several projects that provided significant lessons learned.
In 1998-1999, several CENDI agencies worked together to pilot an Interagency Digital Library of Science and Engineering (IDLSE). The purpose of this project was to test the feasibility of developing a system for searching across the information products from multiple CENDI agencies. DOE OSTI, the National Library of Education and DTIC participated in the pilot. Using the Broadsword search software, CENDI successfully demonstrated that searching can be done across heterogeneous distributed databases, but not without significant administrative and technological issues. The lessons learned were reported at the GovTechNet ’99 Conference (Interagency Digital Library for Science & Engineering (IDLSE) Proof of Concept (PowerPoint File, 127 KB)) and at the ACM Digital Libraries ’99 Conference.
In 1998, the CENDI Information Exchange Working Group (now the Content Management and Access Working Group) established a task group to review the digital library initiatives among the CENDI members. The results are documented in the publication CENDI Agency Digital Library Initiatives: Toward a Digital Future (CENDI/98-4). This report serves as a baseline for the agencies in further developing their systems and for joint virtual library initiatives.
