It is an interaction prototype, not a polished graphical user interface, and is a front end to an evolving variety of distributed document services. Copyright on this material is held by the authors. The Digital Libraries project is not about scanning millions of documents. It is concerned with access to widely distributed digital documents, library services beyond simply acquiring documents, and system architecture that affords uniform use of distributed document services. The underlying software architecture and implementation are provided by the Stanford University InfoBus research prototype.
Components represent capabilities for high-level operations.
The video shows an example workcenter containing a Query Creator component and several Search components. We can type a search string into the Query component and invoke it. The component emits a Query Object, an iconic representation of the query. The Search Component emits a Document Collection object. The Document Collection fills with small document icons as the results of the search are received.