Contents:
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Related Work
- 3 DAR Architecture
- 4 A Case Study for application integration: DAR Books
- 5 The life cycle of a digital document
- 6 DAR and scalability
- 7 Conclusions and Future work
- References
The Digital Assets Repository (DAR) is an Institutional Repository developed at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to manage the full lifecycle of a digital asset. The repository holds more than 450,000 objects like books, photos, manuscripts, maps and 3D objects. Other object types like videos and audio are supported and ingest is planned. DAR builds on standards like METS and MODS for metadata. DAR uniquely identifies objects using a persistent handle and manages one instance of the object inside the repository. DAR heavily relies on RDF relations to define sets and relations between objects. This paper presents DAR’s architecture and the main philosophy behind its design. The focus of the design is to integrate the repository with different sources of digital objects and metadata in addition to integration with applications built on top of the repository. Most of its core components (Digital Assets Factory, Digital Assets Metadata, Digital Assets Keeper, the Online Archive and Digital Assets Publishing) have been developed, using open source tools, and deployed with several applications launched on top. The authors demonstrate in this paper the building blocks of DAR as an example of a modern repository. Section 6 discusses how the developers realised a boost in the query response time, solving the scalability issue with a combination of a 4Store driver for Fedora (instead of Mulgara) and SPARQL queries (instead of ITQL queries).
Informative paper for the ones who are concerned with the architecture of the online AV archive. Specifically relevant for IT staff or system developers who work on system scalability and response time.