The development of these tools will be based on librarian inputs, and will take place concurrently with the development of the distributed database infrastructure. Librarian experience will also be used to design the user interface and specify the capabilities for fielded searches. Fielded searches, where a user can select documents by author, title, publication date, institution or journal, and abstract text, are essential for optimization. The service will also provide for several document delivery options, although the number of options will depend upon the document providers. As a minimum we would expect the information providers to have Postscript versions of preprints and documents available, and these would be downloaded upon request.
Many Web sites provide HTML versions of documents to enable easy browsing.
Software for this project will be written in a variety of object-oriented and procedural languages. Our choice of languages for software components intended for information providers' sites will be based on portability considerations, but will certainly include HTML, and will probably include Perl and C. Design considerations and implementation strategies for each of the four major components of the system are described in more detail below.