A Distributed Implementation of a Catalog of Digitized Cultural Collections

Abstract

We present a distributed catalog of digitized cultural collections. The implementation is based on the recommendation for the national standard for describing collections and the distributed hash table (DHT) protocol Chord. DHT-based networks have emerged recently as a flexible decentralized solution to handle large amount of data without the use of high-end servers. Data storage and data retrieval from different kind of content providers (libraries, archives, museums, universities, research centers, etc.) can be handled uniformly inside a distributed catalog, such that every provider is responsible for its own part of information. This approach can be extended to allow interconnection of different DHT-based networks using an overlay network protocol called Synapse.