Federating Digital Library Services for Advanced Applications in Science and Education

Over the recent years numerous digital libraries have been deployed and enabled in the Internet with the use of various digital library frameworks. They contain valuable digital resources use of which is important to a large community of users, especially within the scientific and educational communities. The access to distributed digital resources has been a subject of research for a few years now. In this paper we present our own work in this area, discussing our approach at the distributed digital library platform that is widely used within the PIONIER optical network. We present the methodology for building distributed search and access to digital publications that allowed to create a national federation of digital libraries and that is now under investigation for possible use within various application fields including medicine, science and education.