Harnessing search engine technology to raise awareness and availability of digital libraries

Searching for information on the Web is easy. Finding high quality information is hard. This partially stems from prevalent use of search engines (SEs) for information seeking tasks, when, for appropriate tasks, wise use of relevant digital libraries (DLs) could provide high quality information. However, the awareness and discovery of DLs on the Web is still lacking. The solution proposed herein is of the SELFDL (SE locator for DLs) model that is patterned after the popular Google style. Its task is to locate DLs, organize them in various knowledge structures, and provide a usable interface for locating relevant DLs. We describe the SELFDL framework that has three major components: directory, index and meta-search engine that are based on a common infrastructure. SELFDL´s aim is to tilt the current balance of use between SEs and DLs in the direction of increased use of DLs, when that use is merited, hence increasing the qualitative use of the Web.