Using XML, XSLT, and CSS in a digital library

This paper describes the evolving information technologies employed in the Digital Library Initiative (DLI-I) Testbed of full-text journal articles at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Specifically, the paper will examine how XML, XSLT, and CSS can be used in a digital library application. The Illinois Testbed, originally established in 1994 and consisting of over 50,000 SGML-formatted articles from more than 44 sci-tech journal titles, has been converted from SGML to XML and employs item-level metadata in XML format utilizing RDF and Dublin Core syntax and semantics extended with project-specific XML tagging. A comprehensive index of article full-text and metadata allows full-text searching across the entire repository. XSLT and CSS stylesheets are used to present metadata and the full-text articles to end-users accessing the Testbed in a Web-based environment. This paper focuses on the techniques used to transform the SGML collection into well-formed XML, the XML metadata structures adopted for the project, and the XSLT and CSS features employed in the Illinois Testbed. Special attention is paid to techniques for rendering mathematics and for transforming real-time between XML and HTML formats.