Before the advent of digital information, attention to information integrity was the charge of a number of institutions - among them research libraries, publishers, and legal authorities. A major challenge in the digital age, and essential to the creation of digital libraries, is the creation of new mechanisms to ensure information integrity and new methods to administer those mechanisms. Information integrity, has three major characteristics:1) reliability, which ensures that information is available where and when people want it.; 2) security, which protects both the privacy rights of users of information and the intellectual property rights of content creators, and 3) preservation, which ensures the longevity of intellectual content for use by future generations. Failure to create these will inevitably threaten the viability of all institutions - government, business, education, and defense - that rely on digital technology for their mission-critical information resources.
The Cornell Digital Library Project will investigate and develop working prototypes of a digital library architecture with particular attention to supporting these integrity issues. The architecture will build on the notion of reusable components, which focus on the critical realities and benefits of the networked environment, global distribution, federation of content and services distributed among multiple administrative entities, and extension where- new components and capabilities can be added to the architecture to suit community-specific requirements or in response to new technologies.
