Enhancing Kepler Usability and Performance

Kepler is an attempt to bridge the gap between established, organization-backed digital libraries and groups of researchers that wish to publish their findings under their control, anytime, anywhere yet have the advantages of an OAI-compliant digital library. We describe an architecture and implementation of the Kepler system that allows an archivelet to be installed in the order of minutes by an author on a personal machine and a group server in less than an hour. The group server will harvest from all archivelets and make the union of all published papers available for search to a community. We describe how a group administrator can provide an XML schema for the metadata and how the Kepler engine will validate against them when an author publishes a paper and completes the metadata. We have demonstrated that we can surmount the technical difficulties for authors to publish as easy as to a website yet produce OAI-compliant digital libraries.