Deployment of quality assurance procedures for digital library programmes

Many digital library programmes have a development philosophy based on use of open standards. In practice, however, projects may not have procedures in place to ensure that project deliverables make use of appropriate open standards. In addition there will be occasions when open standards are not sufficiently mature for deployment in a service environment or use of open standards will require expertise or resources which are not readily available. The QA Focus project has been funded to support a digital library development programme by advising on QA procedures which help to ensure that project deliverables are interoperable. Although the methodology developed by QA Focus is aimed primarily at one particular programme, the ideas and approaches are being made freely available and deployment of the approaches by others is being encouraged. This short paper provides an outline of the work of the QA Focus project and an analysis of the relevance and feasibility of QA Focus recommendations from two contrasting digital library projects.