Presented to Dr. Nazir Sanghi

RAD Corporation VLS is designed to help Allama Iqbal Open University virtual library systems scale as the number of high quality resources on the Internet continues to rapidly grow. The labor costs required to provide both coverage of major subjects, if only in representative ways, and collection maintenance are becoming prohibitive. The large, critical mass of resources that would represent good coverage and enable fine granularity in searching, which users of Internet finding tools often expect, isn’t present in most Internet virtual libraries, whether of single or multi-subject focus. At the same time, commercial virtual libraries and finding tools continue to evolve at a rate that non-commercial virtual libraries have been unable to match.

Some of the major features of the VLS system include:

1. A core system that is fast, robust, reliable and scalable to millions of records and users.
2. A content creation and editorial system that supports best practices in expert based content creation procedures (i.e., an advanced “production line”), as established by librarians with almost a decade of virtual library content building experience.
3. An array of Web crawlers capable of fully- to semi-automating the identification of significant Internet resources.
4. Classifiers that fully automate metadata content creation in areas such as title, author, keyphrase, annotation, and subject identification and assignment.
5. Classifiers that enable semi-automated metadata content creation providing expert/machine interaction throughout the record building process. This is usually applied to high value resources that are either expert suggested or weighted as highly significant by the crawlers.
6. An interface building system that accommodates the needs of institutions for a consistent Internet virtual library presence and front-end by providing a wide choice of interface options for searching, browsing and expert content building. Custom or “branded” views of data content and search results are supported.
7. Search/browse interface options that provide users with great flexibility in finding resources and which support all levels of user search skills.
8. Resource savings through fully- and semi-automating laborious content creation and maintenance tasks and through cooperative, multi-institutional collection building and sharing.

Support for single or multiple subject virtual library projects which can share data and efforts on any of several levels of cooperation.

Support for the following standards: OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), Dublin Core, MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging), Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and Library of Congress Classifications (LCC).

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