New Release of Dienst distributed digital library server

Carl Lagoze (lagoze@CS.Cornell.EDU)
Fri, 3 Feb 1995 02:41:45 +0100


Release 3.5 of the Dienst server is now running at Cornell University

The Dienst development group at Cornell has finished development of release
3.5 of the Dienst software. Dienst is a protocol and server for providing
distributed document servers over the World Wide Web. Dienst provides three
digital library services; repository services that store and deliver
multi-format documents, index servers that index meta-information on documents
and provide search engines over these indexes, and user interfaces services
that provide a human front-end to the two other services. Multiple Dienst
servers interoperate to provide a logically uniform collection to the user,
even though the physical collection is distributed. Each individual Dienst
server "knows" about other sites, and visa-versa, by periodically polling a
central meta-server site.

Documents served by Dienst are each identified by a universally unique document
identifier, or docid. This docid is partitioned into a publisher name and
number. Each document has, at a minimum, bibliographic information stored in a
tagged format. In addition, a document may have serveral other representation
formats (e.g., PostScript, HTML, TIFF, etc).

The new release includes a number of functional and performance enhancements
over previous versions including a new search engine, support for full-text
searching, gateways to other document indexes, and improved installation.

The Cornell server is available at http://cs-tr.cs.cornell.edu.

---------------------------------------------
Carl Lagoze
Senior Software Engineer
Computer Science Technical Report Project
Department of Computer Science
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853

e-mail: cjl2@cornell.edu
phone: 607-255-5691
FAX: 607-255-4428