Towards a distributed architecture for value added services to digital libraries

Scientific communities are relying more and more on value added services offered by different systems on top of digital document repositories and libraries. Current systems, like CiteSeer and Google Scholar, offer important services to these communities but show their limitations when it comes to scalability, decentralize control and plan for a sustainable model for community support. In this paper we propose and describe a new distributed and service oriented architecture to support the creation of such services. Our architecture aims at lowering the technological barriers to build distributed community environments by providing a small number of key core services and a layered architecture for extension services.