Distributed services and metadata flow in the Polish Federation of Digital Libraries

Abstract

The development of digital libraries in Poland was initiated about ten years ago with the start of the dLibra project. This project was aiming for the creation of a software package to facilitate building flexible digital libraries for scientific and cultural institutions. The success of the package and the idea behind it caused rapid increase of the number of digital libraries, reaching 60 on-line instances and 600 000 digital objects in the first half of 2011. Wide use of open protocols and metadata standards was the base for connecting these libraries into a country-scale infrastructure based on distributed services. The need for an integration point of several services induced the establishment of the PIONIER Network Digital Libraries Federation. This paper describes the current state of the digital libraries cyberinfrastructure in Poland, with a focus on two aspects of it - on services available for end-users, digital libraries creators and external systems, and on selective metadata streams flowing through the infrastructure. These selective streams allowed making a connection between Polish digital libraries and pan-European services like DART-Europe or Europeana. In case of Europeana it was the first metadata transfer with such scale of the distribution of source metadata providers.