ANN ARBOR—The University Library of the University of Michigan announced free access to its popular suite of class-based middleware. The middleware, or software designed to facilitate communication between the Web and digital library tools such as a search engine, includes powerful digital library functionality such as searching and result-set management.

The software tools created by developers at the University Library work with licensed, commercially available search engines XPAT (University of Michigan) and PAT5.0 (OpenText Corporation) to enable the creation and support of digital library access systems.

Designed for specific categories of digital objects (such as text, images, and bibliographic information converted electronically for computer usage) the software tools provide an easy, consistent method for supporting online collections such as those supported by the Humanities Text Initiative (http://www.hti.umich.edu/) and the Making of America (http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/) collections developed at the University Library. These tools have been developed over a number of years at Michigan, and middleware such as the Text Class, Image Class, Bibliographic Class, and beta version of the Finding Aids Class have recently been released for usage.

To facilitate the further development of these tools and to assist the information community in building and deploying electronic resources, the University Library will provide free Open Source access to these tools. Users are invited to modify and adapt the classes and to share the innovations with the broader community in the spirit of the Open Source Initiative.

To learn more about the U-M’s class-based software and related products, go to http://www.dlxs.org/products/products.html, or email dlxs-info@umich.edu. Information on the Open Source Initiative can be found at http://www.opensource.org/.

University LibraryXPAThttp://www.hti.umich.edu/Open Source Initiativehttp://www.dlxs.org/products/products.html