Page 122 - Building Digital Libraries

General-Purpose Technologies Useful for Digital Repositories

all of the major development languages (both compiler-based
and interpreted). Additionally, the Yaz toolkit comes with a
number of stand-alone command-line tools that provide light-
weight data manipulation, character conversion, and format
manipulation.
MarcEdit (http://marcedit.reeset.net): MarcEdit is a free library
metadata software suite that provides support for working with
nearly all of the metadata formats currently used by cultural
heritage institutions. It provides both built-in transformation
tools and wizards to create dynamic transformations, as well as
editors and global tools for the batch processing of information.
The resource also provides a wide range of functions for doing
data reconciliation with linked data services.

Application Development

Digital libraries often form the initial foundation of a cultural heritage orga-
nization’s digital platform, and they represent a significant reorientation of
the role and services provided by the organization. In a traditional environ-
ment, analog services are easy to define; they are visible and tangible, and
are often tied to people or places. Digital library applications tend to not be
viewed the same way. Digital services are often viewed through the lens of
their function or application. This difference silos applications and func-
tions, making it difficult to see these as parts of a larger whole. But it doesn’t
have to be like that. Through thoughtful and careful planning and develop-
ment, an organization’s infrastructure can be re-formed from a group of
distinct applications to a more cohesive platform of services . . . though
in the case of a digital platform, these services would be represented as a
set of APIs. These programming interfaces offer windows into the library
platform to enable access to actions, data, and services. As one considers
the development of these services and programming interfaces, a handful
of technologies, protocols, and standards will be important.

REST (Representational State Transfer)
Communication online is actually a somewhat messy process with lots
of competing protocols. In the cultural heritage communities, we have
traditionally complicated this process through the use of domain-specific
communication protocols such as Z39.50, SRU, and OAI-PMH. These
technologies are built on top of rather than utilizing traditional established
patterns related to standard web-based communication protocols. The
library community is hardly alone in pursuing such practices. In 2006, it
looked like the business community was shifting its online communica-
tions services away from traditional HTTP-based communications, but
to message-based communication formats like WSDL and SOAP. Even in
the library community, momentum was developing around SOAP-based
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