The interagency digital library for science and engineering: a federated digital library pilot for the U.S. government scientist

CENDI [1] is a federal interagency working group of 10 programs from nine agencies responsible for scientific and technical information management. CENDI supports federal science research and the public's investment through sound information management and infrastructure development. CENDI agencies have developed individual digital libraries. However, when scientists need information from other agencies, they must search different digital libraries. To achieve interoperability in this heterogeneous environment, CENDI is piloting the Interagency Digital Library for Science and Engineering for use by federally funded researchers. The federated digital library technology being used in the pilot is Broadsword [2], originally developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory at Rome AFB for use within the intelligence community. It supports interoperability at three key levels: searching across heterogeneous platforms, data structures, and search engines; universal log-on; and government security levels. The CENDI pilot involves databases from three agencies containing over 10 million records. While the initial focus is on bibliographic and full text databases, the system can be extended to include other formats and document types.