Access and branch management on distributed personal digital libraries.

Abstract

Due to the great volume of digital documents that currently exist, several technologies have appeared to organize, maintain and help users process such amount of information, among them are the personal digital libraries, they allow the creation and administration of collections of digital documents. There are plenty of personal digital library systems available, from general purpose to very specialized versions focusing on a single topic of the domain area, some of them are very popular and have been deployed on several organizations, but there are still areas of opportunity that have not been covered and one that's fundamental for team work and that most of them lack, is a distributed collaboration model without the intervention of a central coordinator, the creation of such model this would give users the necessary tools to implement distributed library cooperation, discover, consume and contribute to public material available in other libraries, and achieve true portability and ubiquitous access even without an Internet connection. The present work proposes a collaboration model that allows users to discover and branch collections built by other users of personal digital libraries while giving users the control and management tools to handle changes and conflicts between collections.