EDoc Server at Humboldt University: Interfaces and Services

Abstract:

Originally established solely for the publication of dissertations the document server of Humboldt University (http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/) has become the basis for the organisational and technological framework for scientific publication offered to all members of the university. To achieve a high quality of the digital documents in respect of usability and sustainability the Electronic Publisihing Group has embarked on the strategy to use XML as the main data format since the first steps were planned. In addition to this a modular and easily extensible metadata model has been developed, supporting both, diverse publication types as well as relations and hierarchies between objects. Having been the first German archive to support the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) as a repository the document server now hosts an OAI service provider which is designated to serve as a search machine for DINI (German Initiative for Network Information) harvesting the German OAI complient university repositories. The OAI protocol has also been applied to establish a value-added service using documents and their metadata from distributed and heterogenous document and publication servers to provide a print on demand service, called ProPrint (http://www.proprint-service.de/). For this purpose a slightly modified metadata format has been defined and the OAI inferfaces of the associated data providers have been extended by a new verb. With the aid of this technological framework users are given the possibility to search distributed archives in an integrated way and to combine the selected documents to a single PDF file which subsequently can be printed by a commercial printing s vice if required. Moreover, the document server delivers its metadata and full text documents via other interfaces to several systems, e.g. to the Digital Library of Humboldt University maintained by the university library, and to the newly established mediaserver for learning and teaching materials at Humboldt University which is built up by the Multimedia Teaching and Lerning Centre of the Computer and Media Service.

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