Implementing BRICKS, a Digital Library Management System

Digital Libraries (DLs) play a central role in the way information is produced, accessed and used in the Internet era. While the Web provides a universal access to uncontrolled information resources, DLs allow large, distributed repositories of multimedia content, annotated with possibly rich semantic structures and regulated by digital rights, to be created and managed to satisfy the needs of vast user communities. This paper describes the main features of BRICKS, an open-source DL management system based on an innovative peer-to-peer architecture and integrating advanced information management techniques, ranging from model-agnostic content and metadata management to distributed query processing.