A metadata approach for designing configurable interfaces in digital libraries

The use of digital libraries has achieved great importance as a friendly environment for users who need information in specific knowledge domains, not only because resources are organized in a systematic way but also because of the many services additionally provided. However, as digital libraries are disseminated on the Web, they require extra facilities to provide an efficient and more friendly environment to their users. This work presents an approach for improving navigation and retrieval in digital libraries, where metadata are used to give expressiveness to the representation of content and structure of digital objects collections. With a detailed description of electronic documents it is possible to develop a customized user interface and more sophisticated search mechanisms to support a user-centered view of the available resources. A metadata model is proposed considering functional metadata categories for electronic resources, whose descriptors are based on well-known formats and standards. This model supports a prototype implementation, which has been applied to a digital library in the computer science domain