Geospatial information is an essential to education in the earth sciences, and implementing geospatial search capabilities in a digital library system has been the topic of research for the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) project for over 7 years. The ADEPT library server (ALS) is a set of digital library services which support distributed searching using constraints based on geospatial, temporal, textural, numeric and hierarchical parameters. ALS is a java web-application that can be loaded into any webserver that supports java servlets. By utilizing standardized library-like indexing methodologies, data centers and libraries, such as the Map and Imagery Laboratory (MIL) at UC Santa Barbara, can develop catalogs of geospatial information. In cooperation with other ADL library instances, the searches can be distributed to multiple sites, with the results aggregated into a single results set.

The ALS attempts to impose minimal metadata standards on collections. Each collection must have minimums set of information that can be mapped to a set of search indices or “buckets”. The latest version of ALS supports methods to speed the creation of collections: search field constants, and template-generated reports.

Versions of ALS have been use at the MIL for over 3 years. A client interface developed by ADL allows for customized collection interfaces. The ADL webclient supports hierarchical collection lists, and distributed searching to multiple collections. The webclient is used by ADL to support geospatial, temporal and textural searching over collections held by the MIL. The public catalog of ADL contains information on both hardcopy and digital information. As of July 2002, the ADL collections contained more than 2.3 million records with more than 20,000 items available for public download. We hold over 6 terabytes of data covering 270,000 digital items that are being prepared for cataloging into the latest version of ALS.

We would like to expand the utilization of the library to data centers and other collection providers and partners. The code is available at http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/middleware/