Forwarded by Girija Srinivasan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Raman Research Institute Library, Tel: +91 80 361 0122 C V Raman Avenue, Sadashivanagar, Fax: +91 80 361 0492 Bangalore 560 080, India. Email: library@rri.res.in ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 17:05:17 -0400 From: Steve Rockey To: slapam-l@lists.yale.edu Subject: Distributed Full Text Search of Math Books Now Available I though this would be of interest to Mathematics Librarians. --Steve

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Distributed Full Text Search of Math Books Now Available

The university libraries of Cornell, G�ttingen, and Michigan are pleased to announce the first public availability of a significant body of mathematical monographs with access provided through a distributed full text search protocol. The virtual collection, comprising more than 2,000 volumes of significant historical mathematical material (nearly 600,000 pages), resides at the three separate institutions and is provided through interfaces to the three entirely different software systems. Public interfaces to the collection may be found at: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/mathall/ and http://mathbooks.library.cornell.edu/ These two public interfaces reflect different development efforts at Michigan and Cornell, each with their own perspective on how to best mediate the search through the protocol, and each based on the protocol.

The protocol for this distributed search was developed by the three participating institutions over the last two and a half years, with generous support provided by the National Science Foundation. Working from the roots of the DIENST and the then-emergent OAI protocols, the project team focused on creating a new protocol--dubbed CGM, for "Cornell, G�ttingen, Michigan"--that was consistent with OAI, borrowed from DIENST, and added mechanisms for full text searching. The protocol and more project information are available at http://www.library.cornell.edu/mathbooks/.

While our testing has found that network latency and the vicissitudes of different production environments do present challenges, our results indicate that a distributed full text search is certainly viable. We believe that the CGM protocol is relatively unique in providing production-level full text access to distributed collections.

We invite feedback on the effectiveness of the protocol from both users of the materials and from digital library developers. Although essentially a first prototype with significant needs for extension and refinement, we believe that our progress to-date should be encouraging for digital library developers interested in federating collections. And, further, the collection itself is a rich resource for the study of mathematics history and a number of related disciplines. The collections at Cornell and Michigan are both fully searchable, and while the G�ttingen collection currently includes bibliographic information and page images, G�ttingen is actively seeking funding to create full text for its volumes.

We welcome all feedback. Please send comments to cgm-feedback@umich.edu.

We hope that the documentation on the protocol (currently found at http://www.library.cornell.edu/mathbooks/cgmverbs.xml) will spur others to add CGM-capability to their systems. The software created through this NSF-funded grant will be made available in a number of ways. The API developed by G�ttingen, allowing them to provide access through the Agora software, will soon be available to other Agora sites. The functionality developed by Michigan will be included in release 11 of the DLXS digital library software (September, 2003). And Cornell is exploring distribution and support models for its electronic publishing software, DPubS, the system also behind Project Euclid (http://ProjectEuclid.org). If you are interested in using the raw protocol mechanisms at Cornell, G�ttingen and Michigan in your development efforts, please contact: Andrea Rapp, G�ttingen David Ruddy, Cornell John P. Wilkin, Michigan

John Price Wilkin, Associate University Librarian, LIT

Steven Rockey Director of the Mathematics Library 420B Malott Hall Cornell University Office: 255-5268 Home: 272-8925 e-mail: swr1@cornell.edu Fax: 607-254-5023 http://www.library.cornell.edu/math/