WELCOMEWelcome to the home page of the Alexandria Project. We are a consortium of researchers, developers, and educators, spanning the academic, public, and private sectors, exploring a variety of problems related to a distributed digital library for geographically-referenced information.
Distributed means the library's components may be spread across the Internet, as well as coexisting on a single desktop. Geographically-referenced means that all the objects in the library will be associated with one or more regions ("footprints") on the surface of the Earth.
The centerpiece of the Alexandria Project is the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL), an online information system inspired by the Map and Imagery Laboratory (MIL) in the Davidson Library at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The ADL currently provides access over the World Wide Web to a subset of the MIL's holdings, as well as other geographic datasets.
MISSION STATEMENTThe mission of the Alexandria Digital Library Project involves:
- research on issues critical for the construction of distributed digital libraries of geospatially-referenced, multimedia materials;
- development of technologies necessary to support such a library;
- design, construction, and evaluation of testbed systems based on research and development results;
- resolution of organizational and technological issues underyling transition from testbed system to operational digital library.
COLLECTIONSADL is in the process of loading significant collections of geospatially-referenced information. The construction of large and useful collections is necessary for a variety of research purposes as well as for an operational digital library, which entails our collections being relatively large in order to provide appropriate extents and density of coverage.
An important focus for ADL's collection is on information supporting basic science, including the Earth and Social Sciences. This information is being distributed over various sites, including a "clone" at San Diego Supercomputer Center as well as in the UC Berkeley digital library. The datasets that we are in the process of loading include:
Metadata + basic data
ADL's guidelines for the selection of materials for its collections include:Metadata only
- AVHRR
- Digital Elevation Models (DEMs)
- Digital Raster Graphics (DRGs)
- Scanned Aerial Photographs
- Landsat TM
- Seismic datasets and technical reports
- Sierra Nevada Ecologic Project datasets
- Mojave Ecologic Project datasets
- Gazetteers
- Geodex
- GeoRef
- Mojave bibliography
- PEGASUS map records
There will be exceptions to these guidelines. For example, we will grow ADL's collections in part by digitizing analog materials and we will also load materials that are encumbered to demonstrate our ability to handle intellectual property rights issues.
- the content of the materials should involve significant georeferencing representable by "graphical footprints" on some map
- the content should be of value to some well-defined, accessible set of users
- for the mostpart, the materials should be unique, or not otherwise available, and focused on "local" areas, with decreasing density of coverage with distance from the geographical locations of the ADL nodes
- the materials should showcase ADL's research and development mission, involving distributed collections of heterogeneous data types (multimedia), heterogeneous (distributed) search and post-retrieval processing
- the materials should involve, if possible, a minimal support burden for ADL, and focus on unencumbered items already in digital form that have the potential of being scaled to collections with large numbers of items
Image and more information are available HERE.
Using ADLInformation on obtaining and using our JIGI client software is available at http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/adljigi