A distributed alerting service for open digital library software

Alerting for digital libraries (DL) is an important and useful feature for the library users. To date, two independent services and a few publisher-hosted proprietary services have been developed. Here, we address the problem of integrating alerting as functionality into open source software for distributed digital libraries. DL software is one application out of many that constitute so-called meta-software: software where its installation determines the properties of the actual running system (here: the digital library system). For this type of application, existing alerting solutions are insufficient; new ways have to be found for supporting a fragmented network of distributed digital library servers. We propose the design and usage of a distributed directory service. This paper also introduces our hybrid approach using two networks and a combination of different distributed routing strategies for event filtering.