A digital library for a virtual organization

In this paper we discuss the digital library metaphor and introduce the concept of networked digital library, here defined as a library with the additional mission of stimulating, supporting, disseminating and recording the process of creation of information. The ArquiTec project is presented as a pragmatic implementation of that concept for an example of a virtual organization: the Portuguese academic and research community. ArquiTec is a system with a distributed architecture based on the NCSTRL technology. Local nodes manage local repositories at universities and research institutes, but all collections are freely accessible from any node. Based on that infrastructure, the Portuguese National Library will manage a central repository of official persistent digital documents. ArquiTec further integrates a filtering service, based on user profiles, a public document annotation service, and an ontology space based in the integration of multiple statistical and formal thesauri.