Towards policy and quality interoperability: challenges and approaches for digital libraries

Interoperability is a property referring to the ability of diverse systems and organisations to work together. Today interoperability is considered a key step to move from isolated digital archives and digital libraries towards a common information space that allow users to browse through different resources within a single integrated environment. Here we describe the technological challenges that digital libraries face towards policy and quality interoperability, presenting an overview of how the EU-funded DL.org (http://www.dlorg.eu/) and international experts are investigating a shared policy and quality framework between distributed environments that give access to large scale digital collections. The interim outcomes of this research are illustrated, including how external parties may also benefit from the findings.