DIRECT: a System for Evaluating Information Access Components of Digital Libraries

Abstract

Digital Library Management Systems(DLMSs) generally manage collections of multi-media digitalized data and include components that perform the storage, access, retrieval, and analysis of the collections of data. Recently, the new trend of DLMS applications is pushing towards a components/services technology which is becoming more and more standardized [1,2]. The results of this new orientation are ad-hoc solutions for different components and services of DLMS: the data repository, the data manager, the search and retrieval components, etc. We are particularly interested in the evaluation aspects that range from measuring and quantifying the performances of the information access and extraction components of a DLMS to designing and developing an architecture for a system capable of supporting this kind of evaluation in the context of DLMS[3,4]