The BRICKS Digital Library Infrastructure

Service-oriented architectures, and the wider acceptance of decentralized peer-to-peer architectures enable the transition from integrated, centrally controlled systems to federated and dynamic configurable systems. The benefits for the individual service providers and users are robustness of the system, independence of central authorities and flexibility in the usage of services.

This chapter provides details of the European project BRICKS,¹ which aims at enabling integrated access to distributed resources in the Cultural Heritage domain. The target audience is broad and heterogeneous and involves cultural heritage and educational institutions, the research community, industry, and the general public. The project idea is motivated by the fact that the amount of digital information and digitized content is continuously increasing but still much effort has to be expended to discover and access it. The reasons for such a situation are heterogeneous data formats, restricted access, proprietary access interfaces, etc. Typical usage scenarios are integrated queries among several knowledge resource, e.g. to discover all Italian artifacts from the Renaissance in European museums. Another example is to follow the life cycle of historic documents, whose physical copies are distributed all over Europe.

A standard method for integrated access is to place all available content and metadata in a central place. Unfortunately, such a solution requires a quite powerful and costly infrastructure if the volume of data is large. Considerations of cost optimization are highly important for Cultural Heritage institutions, especially if they are funded from public money. Therefore, better usage of the existing resources, i.e. a decentralized/P2P approach promises to deliver a significantly less costly system,and does not mean sacrificing too much on the performance side.