Towards a self healing information system for digital libraries

An important area of focus in complex systems development is the capability to adapt to variable runtime environmental resources and to accommodate runtime system failures. The research in this area is broadly termed as Self Healing and has recently aroused increasing attention to complex systems. Digital libraries have gained popularity because of the richer features they provide compared to traditional libraries. As more users begin to use digital libraries, addressing downtimes of these valuable resources has become a high priority. Operating and providing access to digital content to anyone, anytime from anywhere in the world, results in a continued rise of administrative overhead for system monitoring and needs continuous human intervention. Given the volume of information and the huge infrastructure of modern libraries, continuous manual system administration is quite costly and not feasible. In this paper we propose a self healing digital library system as the solution to this problem and present the approach of adding self healing capabilities to an existing digital library project, the Digital Library of India (DLI). We also propose a self healing framework that enables successful reuse of our approach to other architecturally similar digital library systems.