Page 126 - Building Digital Libraries

General-Purpose Technologies Useful for Digital Repositories

the language, though much of the change is due to the improved perfor-
mance found in interpreted languages. The availability of high-performance
interpreted languages, and frameworks like Angular, React, or Node.js, for
development-responsive applications completely in JavaScript has changed
the way applications are created. We see this outside of the library commu-
nity, and believe that it is only a matter of time before most digital library
development adopts these development concepts as well.

Sharing Your Services

Given the relatively low barriers for the development of RESTful-base web
services, the question really comes down to how much control an organiza-
tion is willing to give up as it relates to content. Organizations considering
a digital repository need to ask the following questions when considering
whether or not to offer web-services access to their systems:
1. Is your organization comfortable giving up some control
over how content is utilized? This is a big question to
consider, since users occasionally have a quirky way of
doing unexpected things. The Hamster sudoku game is
a benign example of a user repurposing images in a way
that was never intended by the content owners. However,
these images could just as easily show up on a website
in a way that the content owners would find inappropri-
ate. Is this something your organization can live with? If
not, then the organization will need to carefully consider
what types of access it is comfortable providing.
2. Can we support it? In the case of providing web-services
access to one’s digital repository, support will need to
be twofold. First, the organization needs to be will-
ing to provide infrastructure support. Where a digital
collection to build a popular web service—how would
the additional traffic affect the quality of the service?
And second, the organization needs to be willing to
provide users with support through the creation of
documentation, and so on. Could your organization
provide support for these types of API usage? What
kind of programming staff is currently available in your
organization?
3. Can your digital repository exist outside your organiza-
tion’s existing information infrastructure? If the answer
to this question is no, then you likely will need API
access to the digital repository. At this point, one would
just need to decide whether to make that access public or
private.

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