The Scholnet project aims at building a digital library infrastructure for supporting communication and collaboration among networked scholarly communities. In addition to the provision of standard digital library capabilities for information acquisition, description, archiving, access, search, and dissemination, this infrastructure will provide support for non-textual data types, hypermedia annotation, cross-language search and retrieval, and personalised information dissemination.

From the technical point of view, Scholnet is being built by augmenting an existing federated digital library system, OpenDLib, with modules that implement non-standard digital library services.

The Scholnet infrastructure will be “open”, i.e. it will allow an incremental service extensibility to meet the specific needs of the different scholarly communities.

Scholnet will be used to create a digital library infrastrucure serving the Working Groups of the ERCIM.