Collaborative Digital Library Services in a Cloud

We have developed a web-based system that allows users to collaboratively organize large online image collections according to an evolving faceted classification schema. One of the major issues identified in the early deployment and evaluation in a university setting is the scalability of the system on traditional server implementations. Traditional computing cannot support ever-increasing number of users, documents, schema objects, schema history, and automated classification processes without difficult, expensive and time consuming resource reconfiguration. To address this problem we are proposing to move our system on a cloud-based Microsoft Windows Azure platform exposing it to users as a collaborative cloud service. Cloud computing will enable the Facet System to scale virtually unlimited. In this paper, we describe the architectural design for deploying our facet-based system and early prototypical modules as well as the work in progress implementing it on the Windows Azure platform.