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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 3333–3337Cite as

Searching Digital Libraries

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Synonyms

Federated search

Definition

Searching digital libraries refers to searching and retrieving information from remote databases of digitized or digital objects. These databases may hold either the metadata for an object of interest (e.g., author and title), or a complete object such as a book or a video.

Historical Background

The initial efforts to standardize and facilitate searching of digital libraries date back to the 1970s, when the development of the Z39.50 protocol started. The Z39.50 protocol is an ANSI standard and defines how to search and retrieve items from a remote database catalog. The Z39.50 protocol was widely deployed within library environments, allowing users to perform searches to remote libraries.

With the advent of the Web, libraries started digitizing and making contents available on the Web, and the Z39.50 protocol started losing its importance. Many libraries made their content “searchable” through standard Web forms, allowing users to search and retrieve...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis

Authors
  1. Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Amr El Abbadi

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Ipeirotis, P.G. (2018). Searching Digital Libraries. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_327

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