Enhancing Digital Information Interoperability And User Interaction Among Ethiopian Higher Education Digital Libraries

Abstract

When currently some Ethiopian Higher Educations are implementing digital libraries for their actual clients and interoperability is one of the advancement features of digital libraries, extending this service is this study purpose. Therefore this study identifies Ethiopian Higher Education Digital Libraries tools they used; service they provide as well as identifies stakeholders, developers and end users so that discussing three interoperability approaches used by digital libraries. Because of simplicity and suited for current EHIDLs over other protocols OAI-PMH metadata harvesting approach is deployed to EHIDL. Thus first we proposed EHIDL-AP metadata schema; then for DSpace and Greenstone digital library tools demonstration about how to use EHIDL-AP schema and implement data provider also presented; those metadata created by those institutions service provider using PKP OHS tools will harvest, normalize and make available for EHIDL users. Service provider (federated system) of EHIDL architecture, installation overview, adding EHIDL-AP schema, adding data providers, harvesting metadata, searching and browsing functions also discussed. Finally the study conclusions presented with a long side of recommendations for future works to be done to maximize the semantic level of interoperability among EHIDLs.