Developing and maintaining a digital library requires substantial investments that are not simply a matter of technological decisions, but include also organizational issues (user roles, workflows, types of contents, etc.). These issues are often handled by approaches based on a physical perspective that treats the stored information either in terms of data formats or physical space needed to archive them. All these perspectives completely ignore the semantic aspects of the digital contents. In this paper, we address such a semantic perspective. More specifically, we propose a service-oriented architecture that explicitly includes a semantic layer which provides primitive services to the applications built on top of the digital library. As part of this layer, a specific component is described: the PIRATES framework. This module assists end users to complete several tasks concerning the retrieval of the most relevant content with respect to a description of their information needs (a search query, a user profile, etc.). Techniques of user modeling, adaptive personalization, and knowledge representation are exploited to build the PIRATES services in order to fill the gap existing between traditional and semantic digital libraries.